“... out a little piece of Pennsylvania as his literary duchy, his gleaming facility was found suspect by some detractors, its satin finish the imposture of a fair-haired boy out to impress his elders with the fine flick of his exquisite perceptions and deflective modesty. ‘The New Yorker and John Updike are both deeply immersed in the image of man as ...”

“... There wasn’t anything inevitable about David Cameron’s rise. If Kenneth Clarke had stirred himself into running something like a campaign when competing for the leadership with Iain Duncan Smith and been ready to appear more tractable on Europe; if David Davis had moved decisively in the immediate aftermath of Michael Howard’s resignation or been a more fluent speaker; if Howard had offered Cameron the shadow chancellorship or George Osborne had not accepted it – if these or any number of other contingencies had been otherwise, Cameron might not have become leader ...”

“... Humpty Dumpty was ‘the official guide’ to the vocabulary of Finnegans Wake. Why wouldn’t he be? He was the inventor of the portmanteau word (‘You see it’s like a portmanteau – there are two meanings packed up into one word’), an inspired parodist of what Saussure later called the arbitrariness of the linguistic sign (that is, its being grounded ...”

“... is a process. A rhythm. Toxins are secreted around body, organs become accustomed and, perverted by custom, addicted.’ The deep link between spiritual state and bowel habit was well known to the ancients – viz the Aristotelian catharsis – but too often since then has been bypassed, though everybody knows in their gut of guts how real it is. What a ...”

“... music enthusiasts filed into the Maverick Concert Hall near Woodstock to hear a piano recital by the young virtuoso David Tudor. That they should be here, tucked away in the Catskills, was already extraordinary. The Maverick is more hermitage than concert hall: a wooden, barn-like ...”

“... George W. Bush. The obsession with Nader is at first puzzling: blame for Bush’s ascendancy can be traced to many other sources. Gore’s campaign was timid and bungling, but in any case he won the election and was only denied office by wholesale Republican electoral fraud in Florida and ...”

“... mother, Linda, once told a journalist, ‘that if I married his father the results would be amazing.’ Was Updike amazing? In the most simple terms, which were the ones he favoured, he was an exemplary American success story: a child of the Depression who passed from a hardscrabble youth through the halls of the meritocracy to become a rich man on ...”

“... dreamed up much of the look, the attitude and the lyrics, though not the sound. A full year before David Bowie adopted the same hair style, Westwood had her hair bleached blonde and cut ‘coupe-sauvage’ style: tufty, asymmetrical and barmy-looking. She went to America and dressed the New York Dolls. Together, she and McLaren assembled the Sex Pistols, whom ...”

“... By the end​ of the 1980s, two formerly arcane disciplines with roots in the French 1940s were readily available to British aspirants. One was post-structuralism, which not many years earlier you’d have had to go to Paris or New Haven to hear about. Now you could pick up the rudiments of it in any university town, and though there was still an exciting whiff of controversy around ‘theory’, a topic known to make right-wing broadsheets and Oxbridge fellows see red, there were many well-written bluffer’s guides, headed up by Terry Eagleton’s ...”

“... it in terms appropriate to their arts: the lute and lyre are in the margins of the plate, ready to be strummed. But the first form of the story is visual: Job sits in a circular room – or maybe it is ten or 12-sided – and points towards two frescoed roundels on the walls left and right. Neither is unequivocally an episode from Job’s life – they could ...”

“... freedom, independence, improvisation, cultural survival – that transcend music, values shared by Coleman’s friend John Coltrane, who, just before he died in 1967, requested in his will that Coleman perform at his funeral. With Coleman’s death, an era closes. As the jazz DJ Phil Schaap said, ‘I have the feeling of the conclusion of the age of the ...”

“... By 1963​ , John Cage had become an unlikely celebrity. Anyone who knew anything about music – who had perhaps followed the perplexed reviews in the New York Times – could tell you how he had managed to transform the piano into a one-man percussion ensemble by wedging nails, bolts and erasers between its strings; or how he had – ‘and you’re never gonna believe this’ – somehow composed silent music ...”

“... of great fiction do not change, much,’ Zadie Smith wrote eight years ago in an essay about David Foster Wallace. ‘But the means do.’ She was between novels: three years had passed since her most traditional, On Beauty, was published; NW, her most experimental, wouldn’t appear for another four. But, as sometimes happens, the changes on the surface ...”

“... the foundations’ of independent local administration. Until then, most prisons had been run by local authorities. Conditions varied hugely: wealthier inmates at Holloway, such as W.T. Stead, editor of the Pall Mall Gazette, could pay six shillings to entrepreneurial jailers for a private cell and a ‘first-class’ stay. (‘Never had I a pleasanter ...”

“... The first​ academic book I read on Goya was by Fred Licht, for whom Goya distilled the ‘modern temper’ in art. It was thrilling stuff. Goya, it seemed, was a rebel and a nihilist, who profaned the nude, renounced the Enlightenment, mocked the royal family, championed the masses and anticipated war photography ...”