“... At the end of a recent and refreshingly untypical poem R.S. Thomas, recalling his sea-captain father, addresses him where he lies in his grave:               And I, can I accept your voyages are done; that there is no tide high enough to float you off this mean shoal of plastic and trash? We have heard something like this before, in more reverberant metre: But thrown upon this filthy modern tide And by its formless spawning fury wrecked ...”

“... Professor of Law at the University of Oklahoma, and of her adversary, Supreme Court Judge Clarence Thomas, and of his Senate sponsor, John Danforth, and of his most effective champion on the Senate Judicial Committee, the fearsomely-named and viciously forensic Arlen Spector. On 11 October, when Professor Hill began her televised allegations, this was the only ...”

“... novel contains two-thirds of the total text), shuffled to appear in random order. There must be more constraints than this, otherwise the number of possible versions would be far greater than 109 trillion, but I don’t know what they are. Balestrini has said there are only the two rules. Citing the magic number in his excitable introduction to a new ...”

“... who didn’t write anything at all about his op-ed. I found all this tiresome, self-indulgent and more than a little embarrassing. Still, there must be many more for whom Goldberg’s obsessive return to his own humiliation is compelling, one of the reasons the book has moved up the bestseller charts so briskly. No matter ...”

“... saw as characteristic of an outdated system of government soon to be swept away by the Civil War. More recently, there have been ingenious attempts to link the two by arguing that Bacon’s reform of natural philosophy was part of a grand programme to strengthen the crown by placing the control of knowledge in the hands of royal institutions. It seems ...”

“... between the wartime austerity they labour under and the cornucopia he revels in. He’s no more despicably selfish than any other of the characters, however; perhaps less so – after all, he gave up on his fellow citizens only after they wouldn’t let him help them. Acharnians is in some sense an ‘anti-war’ play, but it’s not of course ...”

“... every other aspect of this woefully misconceived adventure, the Coalition has ended up doing far more harm than good. The smothering of Babylon is symptomatic of the thoughtlessness – and the disregard for history, ancient and modern – that has characterised this war since its first devising. In the sixth century BC, the Babylonian New Year would be ...”

“... has made me wonder about old forms of timekeeping. Did they serve to make the passing of time more bearable? Did almanacs, with their cycles of the moon and the stars, red letter days and anniversaries, or breviaries and Books of Hours, with their feasts and saints’ days, help distinguish one day from the next ...”

“... is ‘like being a grown-up caught picking your nose and eating it’. For Jacqui Smith, it was more a case of the entire country walking in on her husband having a wank. Then there’s Dennis Bates, who according to the Telegraph has been giving tax advice to his wife, the Labour MP Meg Munn, and several of her colleagues, including the foreign ...”

“... 950 passwords from a naval weapons station, perhaps the US should think twice about paying Boeing more than $100 billion to supply and manage the Future Combat Systems (FCS) project, which will connect every soldier, pilot, gun, radio and missile in the US military to a giant ‘global information grid’. The UK is planning a similar programme, known as the ...”

“... a few dollars, one per honest reader per pre-prepared episode. Money for old rope, to buy King more time. Those less famous than King who fancy getting published online can apply to author-direct.co.uk, a new website launched at the Hay-on-Wye festival in May. It goes live some time this month. Laurence Middleton Jones, the company’s managing ...”

“... never again to expose myself to the chance of such an indignity.’ The story isn’t made any more plausible by Conan Doyle’s clunking attempts to establish the commonsensical reliability of his narrator: ‘As a medical man, I know that a nightmare is simply a vascular derangement of the cerebral hemispheres.’ It’s all too easy to sympathise with ...”

“... in Short Cuts), you could be forgiven for thinking there ought to be a referendum on the matter. A more interesting poll would unearth how many people think Kilroy-Silk already is the leader of Ukip, since there’s little doubt that his tanned presence on the campaign trail, aided by other fading celebrity ghouls such as Joan Collins, is largely responsible ...”

“... In the sweet by and by We shall meet on that beautiful shore … And our spirits shall sorrow no more. In Denmark, cowed into subservient neutrality since August 1914, the Illustreret Tidende dared to write that ‘the disaster was caused by a deliberate act of will on the part of a warmongering nation.’ The Norwegian Morgenbladet was sharper: ‘The ...”

“... his wife, to an open rehearsal of the Missa Solemnis, a work which would figure in Doctor Faustus more than twenty years later. ‘My chief impression,’ he wrote, ‘was of a remarkably handsome young man, Slavic in appearance and wearing a sort of Russian costume, with whom I established a kind of contact at a distance, since he noted my interest in him ...”