“... long before all literature in English is similarly available. Jake Balokowsky will soon have this page on Hypertext. All this information technology will not make books obsolete, but it will mean that one can do a range of new and interesting things with books and, above all, save time for actually reading them. And with its access to the state’s ...”

“... the New Yorker, where Max seems to be subject to heavier editing than in this biography. Later on page 1: ‘Midwestern virtues of normality, kindness and community also dominated.’ The ‘virtue’ of ‘normality’ is something Max seems very intent on pinning to Wallace, which is strange because Max’s thorough and conscientious reporting actually ...”

“... they therefore bear some sort of responsibility. This is nowhere more apparent than in the one page Bunting devotes to the fate of Jersey’s Jews – or rather the 12 people she claims were registered as such by the Chief Aliens Officer. (Strangely, she ignores the Jews who remained off the record, including the well-known Surrealist photographer, Claude ...”

“... On the last page​ of his book about his father, Patrick Cockburn writes that Claud ‘disbelieved strongly in the axiom about “telling truth to power”, knowing that the rulers of the earth have no wish to hear any such thing. Much more effective, he believed, is to tell truth to the powerless so they have a fighting chance in any struggle against the big battalions ...”

“... he prescribed. Their campaign inevitably had particular problems with the cultural legacies of the Norman conquest. John Green, with exactly the bluntness he advocates, longed for the linguistic and ethnic purity of Anglo-Saxon England. ‘Before the Conquest by Bastard William that the French came in,’ he claimed in 1615, ‘our English tongue was most ...”

“... to be exposed early to Greek or Latin, or even to their own language as it existed before the Norman Conquest, tend to find the notion of grammatical case baffling despite the survival in English of a genitive case (renamed possessive) and the distinction between subject and object pronouns in the first and third persons. Evidently, the alleged Irish ...”

“... The books proceed chronologically and democratically, with each style allotted the same space: one page of text and one illustration. Pillar to Post deals with exteriors, Homes Sweet Homes with interiors. Otherwise there is no attempt at fairness, which is fatal to humour. Like his friend and contemporary Kenneth Clark, Lancaster felt the ...”

“... he can find: the theoretical writings of Isidore Isou and Guy Debord, Larry Clark’s pictures, Norman Cohn’s The Pursuit of the Millennium, Theodor Adorno (in particular his great and mordant Minima Moralia), Christopher Gray’s Leaving the 20th Century, Abiezer Coppe, Georges Bataille. Oddly, the name William Blake never passes the lips(tick) of this ...”

“... about the teenage Lewis and his early obsession with Peter Sellers. ‘My first movie love was Norman Wisdom,’ we are told, and soon we are settling down with our narrator in the front parlour of the family home in ‘rain-lashed industrial South Wales’, watching old comedy movies on a Coronation-era TV with a wonky contrast-control. Next we learn how ...”

“... forty pages of marriage, and why people do these things God only – but we are straying from the page. Their quarrels, misunderstandings and jealousies were like those of other families. And she was like other girls who marry into a group of powerful personalities. She was tugged in different directions by all of them. They expected things of her. They ...”

“... their familiarity with Medieval English. The glossary entry for blanc alone occupies a whole page, and entry after entry supplies either new knowledge or informed speculation: ‘Balloc broth, balough broth, a fish soup ... Since there is no recorded meaning for ballok other than testicle, which does not seem appropriate for a fish stew, it is more ...”

“... notably Richelieu and Olivares, but one cannot expect to find incisiveness in a seven-hundred-page book. There are compensations, however. Having refused to exploit the advantages of hindsight, and kept close to the chronological order of events, Elliott can shock his readers, as Olivares was himself shocked, with the news of the twin revolts of Catalonia ...”

“... The Gawain poet’s language shows much less of the French influence that was the legacy of the Norman Conquest. Instead there are northerly inflections, with outlandish spellings and flickers of Norse strangeness.We can splice these tells with a clutch of references to actual places in Gawain. While the locations described in Pearl, Patience and Cleanness ...”

“... movements in the structure of the beaches. In the course of his research, he unearthed an ‘Anglo-Norman’ poem which described how William (afterwards ‘the Conqueror’) had crossed the sea on his way from Cherbourg to Ries on a ridge of rock at low tide. The continued existence of the ridge was then confirmed by aerial photograph. Modern battles, it ...”

“... in a game where each new transgression shocks less. Derek Jarman’s Blood (repeats of Sun front page reading ‘AIDS BLOOD IN M&S PIES PLOT’ overpainted in red with lines of the word ‘blood’ scratched white out of the red) is perfunctory. Aids, which gives these pieces a claim on our attention, tests them destructively by making it natural to ask ...”