“... by bones and skeletons since childhood’. His first experience of film involved watching a flying skeleton horse pull a bewitched carriage across the sky, in Georges Méliès’s Les 400 Farces du diable. It was skeletons, he says, that made him go to Mexico: I remember holding a ...”

“... their own language. Sign languages are now known not to be parasitic on spoken ones, and not to be a form of pantomime, a kind of charades. They do not have anything much like the structure of any spoken language, but they have comparable expressive power. Nor has the breakthrough been the invention of some new and better ...”

“... He died, one Jesuit said, ‘like a flower in the field that closes at night’. Some time in the evening of 28 September 1978 Albino Luciani, Pope John Paul I, abandoned his tenure of the throne of St Peter. He had been Pope for only 33 days. The news was entirely unexpected. Unlike his predecessor, John Paul had shown no signs of ill-health during his brief reign, and very soon it began to be rumoured that he had been poisoned ...”

“... the printer’s name. No such rigorous obligation attaches to statements of authorship. It is a licence that fiction, in particular, has richly exploited. Ever since its rise the novel has flirted with authorial anonymity and pseudonymity. Great unknowns, pen names and spoof attributions figure centrally in the genre’s history, from Scott, to George ...”

“... When​ I was young I thought poetry and poetry anthologies could change the world. ‘If a man were permitted to make all the ballads,’ Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun wrote, ‘he need not care who should make the laws of a nation.’ But nationality still mattered: Seamus Heaney’s reaction to his inclusion in Blake Morrison and Andrew Motion’s 1982 Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry was ‘My passport’s green ...”

“... evening, early this century, Washington Square West, Philadelphia. Washington Square West overlaps an area identified by W.E.B. Du Bois in The Philadelphia Negro as the Seventh Ward, the site of many places famous in Black history: Mother Bethel A.M.E. Church; the Institute for Coloured ...”

“... Although it is unusual, there is nothing novel about a member of the Bar being appointed directly to the UK’s highest court. When the highest court was the appellate committee of the House of Lords, appointments to it were occasionally made in this way, sometimes to good effect. Among the last, now more than half a century ago, were James Reid QC, a Scottish Tory MP who, as Lord Reid, became one of the best judges of the postwar years, and Cyril Radcliffe QC, a distinguished public servant and barrister ...”

“... another been born in full sunlight and lived to see night fall.’ (That’s from Waugh’s Men at Arms.) Then the first image: Stephen Newman in his shorts, aged nine, on the ‘most exciting day’ of his life – a day spent in the fur storage depot in which his father looks after Marilyn Monroe’s mink. The sun ...”

“... row which erupted less than twenty years ago over the proposal to replace the House of Lords by a Supreme Court for the United Kingdom may wonder not only why anyone should have opposed the move but how it was that the upper chamber of the legislature had become the country’s final court of appeal in the first place....”

“... In the early 1960s a spectre was haunting New York, the spectre of banality. Hannah Arendt was publishing her articles on ‘Eichmann in Jerusalem’ in the New Yorker, and the mostly Jewish intellectual community associated with Partisan Review, Dissent and Commentary was appalled by her notion of the ‘banality of evil ...”

“... A great many novels nowadays are just travel books,’ Ivy Compton-Burnett grumbled to Barbara Pym in 1960. ‘Olivia has just published one about Bulgaria.’ She hadn’t noticed that the setting of The Great Fortune is in fact Romania. But she had a point. Journeys, voluntary and enforced, are big in Olivia Manning’s work, as they had been in the first forty years of her life, and the painter manqué in her always made the most of topographical detail ...”

“... paradoxical. The short story – Barker’s preferred literary form – cannot comprehend anything as large as life. In the face of this paradox, she has devised a new kind of cycle. Instead of the traditional bonding of carried-over place or character, Barker has abstracted items from ...”

“... In the face of a worldwide recession, the literature industry proceeds apace. While the market for trade books grows more enfeebled, academic publishers show no sign of cutting back on their recondite lists. Despite the dwindling number of jobs in universities (and why else are some of these books written except to secure or keep a job?), scholars continue to turn out the daunting titles advertised in literary magazines: Milton and the Postmodern, Allen Tate and the Augustinian Imagination, Myths and Texts: Strategies of Incorporation and Displacement ...”

“... the Modern World are Isaac Newton (who wrote the Principia Mathematica) and Samuel Pepys (who, as President of the Royal Society, licensed it to be printed). It is one of the oddest couples in the history of thought: the man who, as a late 17th-century Cambridge student was heard to say, had ‘writt ...”

“... its short history, Australia has weathered several storms. By world standards they were minor, but at home they loomed large. The First World War was a rude awakening; the Great Depression hit harder and lasted longer than anywhere else in the developed world; and the Second World War could have been the end of ...”