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“... were, they ran the risk of going too far in the other direction. ‘As far as the evolution of black music goes, Robert Johnson was an extremely minor figure,’ Wald argued, ‘and very little that happened in the decades following his death would have been affected if he had never played a note.’ His book came close to suggesting Johnson wasn’t much ...”

“... task force, or cast and crew – to work together to get the job done.The example offered is Black Hawk Down (2001), a blockbuster based on a book by Mark Bowden about the near disastrous military operation that culminated in the hasty retreat of US forces from the centre of Mogadishu. Thomson tells us that he has felt compelled to watch the movie over ...”

“... reader’s first glimpse of him, Chéri is dancing in front of the rose-coloured curtains, ‘all black, like a graceful devil’, the pink light making a pink spark play on his teeth and eyes. He’s grabbed the pearls and is parading in front of the full-length mirror, ‘a very beautiful, very young man, neither tall nor short, his hair tinged with blue ...”

“... clawing back of control by central government. First the new methods were mocked. The ‘Black Papers’ published in Critical Quarterly between 1969 and 1977 decried the ‘levelling down … towards a uniform mediocrity’ produced by comprehensive education. The tabloids gave lurid descriptions of the radical approaches taken in schools such as ...”

“... place at the very time when the Italian state lost its power to control law and order. Red and black terrorism of the 1970s shook the credibility of the Police, and an almost uninterrupted string of scandals at every level of government and civic life reduced the will and reliability of bureaucracy. The state lost that ‘monopoly of violence’ which ...”

“... experts are right – goes Montaigne. To the bonfire with William Hazlitt, closely followed by Max Beerbohm, Sainte-Beuve and John Aubrey. A brusque kiss-off to Francis Bacon, Charles Lamb, La Bruyère and the best of Mencken, not to mention Svetonius’s Lives of the Caesars; and into the garbage goes Samuel Johnson’s Lives of the Poets, perhaps the ...”

“... had become a pervasive cultural mood, in concord with many of the preoccupations of the age. For Max Nordau, in Degeneration (1892), the Wagner cult was ‘the most widespread, and therefore the most significant, of all present-day aberrations’. Not everyone was seduced: Rimbaud was indifferent; Tolstoy denounced the Ring cycle as ‘counterfeit art’; a ...”

“... succès d’estime the Smart Set with ‘louse magazines’ such as Parisienne, Saucy Stories and Black Mask. Die neue linie, featuring work by Bauhaus designers such as László Moholy-Nagy, Herbert Bayer and Irmgard Sörensen-Popitz, was a revamp of the mass market German women’s magazine Frauen-Mode and a probable influence on Vanity Fair’s designer ...”

“... rehearsal and performance of experimental music.’ Among those impressed by Cage in Chicago was Max Ernst, who arranged for his wife, Peggy Guggenheim, to celebrate the opening of her new gallery in New York with a concert of Cage’s percussion music. So John and Xenia upped sticks yet again, arriving in the city in the spring of 1942 with 25 cents between ...”

“... and that all others are aberrations. It also stems directly or indirectly from our commitment to Max Weber and his belief in the inevitable disenchantment of the world as a result of capitalist modernisation. Over the past generation, formerly conservative countries such as Ireland, Spain, Portugal and Greece have all been profoundly transformed, and in all ...”

“... processes of ‘savage’ peoples. Such speculations contradicted the theories of Friedrich Max Müller, the comparative philologist who then dominated Oxford. Müller argued that mythology originated in the spiritual insights of the Aryans of ancient India. Over time their grand words for high thoughts were distorted into the names of divine ...”

“... war’s first casualty. Before the First World War, the Greenwich Village rebels Randolph Bourne, Max Eastman and John Reed regarded themselves as nationalistic liberators willing to draw on the country’s intellectual traditions. Eastman defined himself as an ‘American lyrical socialist – a child of Walt Whitman reared by Karl Marx’. But with ...”

“... by an urban expressway and redevelopment – which perhaps had some claim to be Moscow’s Soho. Max Kostin, honest, decent and stupid, becomes a soldier; Yuri Sharok, the son of a tailor who clothes most of smart Moscow, guileful and deceitful, goes into the NKVD and employs as an informer the pretty and promiscuous Vika Marasevich. But though these, and ...”

“... on this stage from time to time are Thomas Hardy, visited more than once in Dorchester: Tea at Max Gate. Lady Stacie there, a descendant of R.B. Sheridan – and a fashionable lady, formerly a great beauty. She gushed to T.H. about his novels at the tea-table. He shut her up by saying ‘I am not interested in my novels. I haven’t written one for more ...”

“... prose is every bit as urgent as his poetry – it crackles like his thistles under a frosty blue-black pressure. In this type of criticism, the reading process becomes more than analogous to the act of writing: reading fuses with writing because it empathises in a dramatic manner with the critic’s struggle to express ideas, a struggle that resembles an ...”