“... An arthritic Chuck Berry on TotP, slobbering the playground snigger of ‘My Ding-a-Ling’? Rod Stewart jiggling his satiny wee buttocks like some bored old burlesque artist? Any of this doing it for you, kids? The backroom intimacy spotlit by Mapplethorpe and Smith looked deeply subversive, but had none of the usual tawdry appliqué of ‘erotica’: its ...”

“... own mixed feelings about film acting. Some movie stars – Ingrid Bergman, say, or James Stewart – are excellent in almost everything they do. Others have glory years interspersed with disappointments. And then there is Taylor. Although technically superb as a film actor, having been schooled since her childhood on the MGM lot, her performances ...”

“... budget. We created this me-first world, now we should give something back,’ says 74-year-old Stewart Dakers. The Mail warns that the ‘Young face future of higher taxes to pay for parents who won’t save, says BoE man.’ Another article in the Guardian tells us: ‘The one demographic group that has not seen its incomes fall since the recession is ...”

“... They described foster carers who ‘could no longer manage [his] behaviour’ and children’s home staff who won his trust, then moved on. The saddest paragraphs were the ones that gave a glimpse of the boy he might have been. ‘When it was suggested to William [then aged ten] that he had the ability to attend mainstream education he was ...”

“... Roosevelt riding at its head, followed by a man with a huge US flag. He and his son Kermit sent home, not a modest set of ‘specimens’, but 512 trophies, including nine white rhino (already rare), seven cheetahs, 17 lions and 11 elephants. Even in those days, this tally provoked international uproar. Less remarkable hunters were not exempted from heavy ...”

“... beside others who had fought and suffered for the cause of Ireland: Daniel O’Connell, Charles Stewart Parnell, Paddy Dignam. Although there is a large collection of Casement documents in the National Library in Dublin (and other items which he brought back from Africa and South America – including costumes and a butterfly collection – in the National ...”

“... promoting hikes in achieved selling prices, while encouraging the neurotic impulse to regard your home as a volatile asset. The canny speculator should be alert for the optimum moment to cash in. Three-bed flats are on offer at £750,000. The average rent in the street is calculated at £1666 per month. Inspired by this febrile vision, householders dig. There ...”

“... into criminals.’ They were criminals under international law, of course, but what were they at home? What is a crime if the rule of crime is limitless?It makes more sense to link the Mabuse fantasy, the dream of the infinitely intelligent malign genius, to the mentality that Arendt, in another book, associates with a particular German mood in the ...”

“... not to mention many of our trees and houses, have longer histories than our country. My family home in Bouillon, on the French border, is decked with photographs of relatives who were born before Belgium was created. There are wooden clogs under the stairs that are older than Belgium. My family is working-class and post-industrial: Walloon first, European ...”

“... self-assured and incurably naive. David Foster Wallace said that he spoke like ‘Jimmy Stewart on acid’ (though Lynch’s addictions were the diner-appropriate kind: coffee, sugar, cigarettes). Whatever the contradiction – mainstream avant-gardist, reactionary visionary, pervert in a top-buttoned shirt – it could be reduced to something ...”

“... probably reinforced the sense that such songs had a worthy place in musical evenings at home. From about this time the sheet music is often advertised in the form of a part-song for soprano, contralto, tenor and bass, and it seems clear from the very large number of advertisements for the music thus arranged that the song was frequently performed ...”

“... centrifugal flight into a wild world is crystallised in the presence of the sea. The polis, the home of the good citizen, here dissolves into what the Servant in Timon of Athens imagines as estranging and divisive: ‘We must all part/Into this sea of air.’ There are many sources, from the Old Testament onwards, for Shakespeare’s understanding of an ...”

“... Russell’s reputation was made by his brilliant defence of the Irish Nationalist MP Charles Stewart Parnell before the Special Commission set up after publication in the Times of what we now know as the Pigott forgeries. (These were documents which quite wrongly linked Parnell to the murder in 1882 of two leading members of the British Administration in ...”

“... mainstream, the result would be an ‘explosion in the heart of the commodity’, as the late Mark Stewart put it, a disruption of the unthinking common sense of an affluent capitalist society. The sleepwalking masses would be jolted into an awareness of the true poverty of their lives, and into the political action necessary to change it.A variety of ...”

“... could not have kept them away. A bold pair, armed with a letter from Lady Sackville or Isabella Stewart Gardner, might have penetrated Rodin’s studio. His bronze statue of Balzac in a dressing-gown, shown at the Salon des Beaux Arts, would already have led the travellers to take sides, some finding it disgusting and incomprehensible while others were ...”