“... West End and then call her. Thus my fascination with London. I went with my mum and then came back by myself when I was 15 to see a musical at the Adelphi called Marilyn. I returned at 18 and ate a bowl of grass in a Vietnamese restaurant in Frith Street. Then I moved down for good in 1990 and spent the next decade in the nearby streets.Soho never was what it ...”

“... H.L. Mencken defined their mentality as ‘the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy’. They held themselves and other puritans to severe account, an obsession they grew into a social vision. They were hard on sin and hard on the causes of sin; they urged magistrates and ministers to join forces, to wield the sword in the service of ...”

“... celebrations. The contribution of my former department to the general gaiety was to be a talk by Margaret Drabble, on the topic of young women at university in the 1960s and 1970s. I was dun gone, as we say in the trade, pensioned off, but reeled in for a last duty. ‘Or as warm-up woman,’ I said in the ...”

“... Any explanation must have recourse to a Braudelian longue durée, in which destruction can be progress – utter devastation turned into a lasting blessing – because capitalist progress is destruction, of a more or less creative sort. In 1945 unconditional surrender forced Germany, or what was left of its western part, into what Perry Anderson has ...”

“... Brain​ science has historically been populated by corpse diggers, pig torturers, vivisectionists, logicians, entertainers, quacks, and quiet careful people who spend a great deal of time with fruit flies. Indeed it hasn’t always been taken as read that the brain was responsible for much at all. Thinking and feeling were most often attributed to the heart, though the second-century physician Galen had other ideas ...”

“... machines were already in use in Chicago, and on their way to Detroit. At the parts plant, by contrast, she had eased the oppressive routine of the working week by wearing a gingham dress, ‘And I could bully the foreman and everybody.’ Though she didn’t mention a Saint Monday, her week had a regular high ...”

“... renewal: Presbyterians sometimes split to survive. In the Highlands rival congregations exist side by side: the Church of Scotland, the Free Church of Scotland, the Free Presbyterian Church of Scotland and the Free Church of Scotland (Continuing), all of which claim to be the true Church of Scotland (these are the main ...”

“... least the ninth century CE, though Taoist alchemists, searching for both gold and immortality, had by then been aware of similar preparations for hundreds of years. A very early reference appears in the Zhenyuan Miaodao Yaolue (Classified Essentials of the Mysterious Tao of the True Origin of Things), a text attributed in part to the third-century alchemist ...”

“... they assumed you were good at logic. It became clear that Davidson had a system, but it needed to be pieced together by the reader, as best he or she could. Puzzlement about a particular Davidson piece would be met with a knowing look from the initiated and the query ‘But have you read ...”

“... through the novels of Faulkner, Dreiser and Updike. ‘All that matters is that his heart must be pure, and he must move forward to the quest which for so many male American writers is the most crucial one: the search for the unfettered self.’ The ‘unfettered self’, or rather its expression in paint, was exactly what the makers of Abstract ...”

“... the smugly ‘fair-minded’, ever-so-right-thinking way in which his tragic story was handled by reviewers.) It is significant, then, that happiness is nowhere a theme for Foucault. No doubt he experienced some happinesses, but happiness formed no part of his philosophy – unlike that of his master Nietzsche, whose Daybreak and Zarathustra are irradiated ...”

“... I will never, come hell or high water, let our distinctive British identity be lost in a federal Europe.’ John Major’s ringing assurance to last year’s Conservative Party Conference is part of a long tradition whereby Britishness has been defined primarily by reference to a real or an imaginary Other ...”

“... sa vie et ses ouvrages’, is plagiarised from two articles in the Southern Literary Messenger by John R. Thompson and John M. Daniel. Daniel’s article is plagiarised in its turn from Griswold’s obituary of Poe – a fraud within a fraud within a fraud. Traduttore: tradittore. If, as the Italians say, to translate is to traduce, isn’t plagiarism a ...”

“... necessarily intertwined in literature and literary criticism’ is the question vigorously debated by the 19 contributors to Shakespeare Left and Right, a question repeatedly and vehemently asked in the current American debate about ‘political correctness’. But in this scene from Julius Caesar the relationship between politics and poetics is not imported ...”

“... Inspired by the bourgeois ‘bad taste’ of Magritte’s house in the Rue des Mimosas in suburban Brussels, Jonathan Miller took off into one of his self-intoxicating fantasies. We were there together in the mid-Sixties to make a film for the BBC, and although I had forewarned him, Jonathan couldn’t believe that this overstuffed furniture, this aviary of china birds, these chiming clocks, garish oriental rugs and draped curtains could form the chosen, or at any rate tolerated, habitat of the austere master of unease ...”