“... of fifty or more people including his aunt, a teacher, a policeman, three ‘lovely lassies’, a rock musician, a turfman and his ass, a farmer and his sheep, at least one neighbour, his mother, and possibly his father as well. Most of these murders are caused, directly or indirectly, by Pat’s relationship with his mother, a fiercely possessive woman ...”

“... the book, might contemplate the debt they owe to those who fought and died for a ‘dispute over a rock with a village population’, to quote the words of one of the dead, Lieutenant David Tinker RN. Perhaps on reflection, and with realistic offers of compensation and, if desired, resettlement, they might accept a ...”

“... my mind was elsewhere, sometimes pondering imagery from familiar hymns: wondering where the ‘rock of ages cleft for me’ might be located (perhaps near where ‘Alf the sacred river ran’?) and what the ‘gracious calling’ might sound like, were I to stand ‘beside the Syrian sea’. At the same time, I was gazing at ‘St Georgius’ in shining ...”

“... another great vita nuova man, ever inclined to exhort himself: ‘Be Samuel Johnson! Be the rock of Gibraltar!’) All the same, despite Svevo’s rule, there have been a few people – Tolstoy, Wittgenstein and D.H. Lawrence come to mind – who not only went on expecting to be transformed, but managed to be so – and this without much reference to ...”

“... to play fifty years ago) were also billed, alongside veterans from the founding festival: Santana, David Crosby, Country Joe McDonald, the remains of the Grateful Dead, Canned Heat and others. But Lang’s fifty-up began to unravel when his top-dog investor, the Japanese digicoms company Dentsu Aegis, announced from its London HQ that it was pulling ...”

“... for example – there’s a kind of aural density, with hip-hop and classical as well as pop, rock, country and right-wing talk shows; the latter two seem to last furthest into the remoteness, and then they fade, and it’s silence or tape. On my way to Highway 50, it was still cool when I ran over a huge snake sunning itself on the asphalt – chipmunks ...”

“... tarpon, radiated from Jim’s wrists and ankles, ran across grass and Jim’s beautiful Japanese rock garden to the back bumpers of cars poised to travel different directions. I wanted to tell Jim that it would be over quickly, that it wouldn’t hurt. Jim Kunkel is the deposed mayor of a suburban town, and he’s being drawn and quartered by automobile. The ...”

“... rarer for a critic, whose work tends to date fast. The morbid, sexy idolatry usually reserved for rock stars, dead poets and suicide blondes is being lavished on him. The front cover of Tynan’s Letters, published in 1994, features a portrait taken by David Bailey, itself a sign of pop status. The front cover of The ...”

“... equally illuminating in charting their subjects’ partial successes and partial failures. Thus David Hume attacked the 18th-century myth of an ancient British constitution and warned his readers of the disastrous political consequences of ignoring their history. By reminding them of the recent emergence of constitutional government he wished to point to ...”

“... in anything approaching a full way. The Times gave it modest coverage, both through the columns of David Wood and through its reports of debates in the plenary sessions. For all practical purposes, the rest was silence.’ Something resembling silence also greeted the European Elections of 1979. These not only produced the present combative European ...”

“... Written in a deadpan, matter-of-fact style, it’s a kind of literary analogue to the indie rock of the mid-Eighties, to the music of bands like the Replacements who sang tepidly defiant sagas of generational self-pity: ‘We’re getting no place/As fast as we can.’ Moody situates a gallery of burned-out kids in the toxic environment of northern New ...”

“... David Freedberg’s new book is illustrated with wonderful, detailed drawings and engravings of plants, fungi, fossils, birds, insects and animals – nearly all made in the 17th century. Freedberg is an art historian; the starting point of his book is a dream he had sometime before 1986 in which Anthony Blunt appeared holding a drawing of an orange ...”

“... cultural reach’ evidently strained every sinew. It apparently infects the 1947 film of Brighton Rock, based on Graham Greene’s novel of 1938. With the exception of Ida’s Pierrot troupe there is little in the film to suggest any link to Victorian England. But then the ‘structure of feeling’ is a woolly conceit, almost a faith. Proof isn’t ...”

“... and pre-Holocaust past. All we needed to do to eradicate it for ever, we thought, was stage more Rock against Racism events. Shakespeare, who did not occupy a cherished place in the hearts of skinheads or NF agitators, didn’t seem central to the issue. If anything, his willingness to write the role of Othello, which despite Burbage’s original blackface ...”

“... seemed to be whatever was happening in Elvis Presley’s eyes. It was Sylvia Plath’s poetry, David Bowie’s soulful space nonsense or the truths riding in on the Jesus and Mary Chain’s guitar feedback. But by the time Dead 2Pac appeared at the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival, deep had begun to signal something netherworldly. Those ...”