“... word about a body of work that he had stuffed with deliberate discrepancies. On the other hand, he may have been aiming to have the last laugh. ‘People understand me so little,’ he said in one of the notebooks, ‘that they fail even to understand my complaints that they do not understand me’. In another note Kierkegaard explained that ‘after my death ...”

“... for the Performing Arts and the New York Historical Society. Long fascinated by the events of 10 May 1849, I couldn’t leave Manhattan without making a pilgrimage to Astor Place. But I could find no memorial to the 26 people killed in one of New York’s bloodiest episodes; nor was there any mention of the two actors, the American Edwin Forrest and the ...”

“... because the word connotes anachronistic misogyny. This girl – sorry, woman – is sexist, you may have thought as soon as you saw my usage. Well, I’m not. These critics aren’t hysterical because they have uncontrollable, misunderstood responses to social problems; they perform hysteria because they know their audience respects the existence of those ...”

“... the falling Oscar distributed upon them, they would have remained in obscurity. Brian Roberts may well have stumbled upon them by accident. Four of his previous biographies have been set, wholly or partly, in Africa; perhaps it was while he was examining the records of Zululand in 1881 that he came across a most improbable figure, Lady Florence Dixie, a ...”

“... escape the biological round of cultivation and consumption; it is a hopelessly natural object. It may, however, as anything in nature may, find its way into literature, and thence into the literature of literature, or in this instance Nature and Language. The subject of this jaunty, promising but muddled book is the ...”

“... vocabulary to do justice to dramatic effect. The impact, experienced immediately by the recipient, may be translated in recollection – and all dramatic criticism is ‘recollection’ – into various thought-moulds, and it is probable that the two views of his acting derived from similar immediate experiences. I would lay great stress on immediacy: what ...”

“... noun as object (and not a gerund or infinitive), and Wv5 indicates that the participle jazzed up may be used adjectivally. This information is not provided to Chambers-users, although they, on the other hand, are specifically informed by sep that they may properly say ‘Those barbarians have jazzed Palestrina up’ as ...”

“... flawed advantages of being ‘authorised’: there are no anecdotes here about what Louis B. Mayer may or may not have done to the pubescent Judy Garland, or others in his thrall. The worst that is said of the man many still speak of as a monster is that he was a ‘part-affectionate, part-retributive tyrant’. Where Mr ...”

“... Division has been Scotland’s arch-fiend and has always stood on “doctrinal purity”. It may be that we are like that and therefore any hope of our ever misgoverning ourselves may mercifully never be realised.’ The wry note in that last sentence wouldn’t have endeared him to the likes of MacDiarmid, and it must ...”

“... dialect poems are plainly superior to his poems in Standard English, much as Burns in Scots is, we may well think, better and more authentic than Burns in English. One who made the comparison with Burns was Gerard Manley Hopkins, writing in 1879 to Robert Bridges. Of Barnes’s dialect poems Hopkins says: ‘A proof of their excellence is that you ...”

“... voters get most of England’s news, often more quickly and more loudly than our own. On 13 May, an immigration enforcement van was spotted in Pollokshields, part of Sturgeon’s Glasgow Southside constituency. The van, in which two Indian men had been detained, was quickly surrounded by protesters demanding their neighbours’ release. The police were ...”

“... of her fright. The noir effect is a stand-in for the movies in general, and the corpse may well be Turner’s career. It’s all too much for her, and she goes off on a drinking binge, her old habit. The film is Vincente Minnelli’s The Bad and the Beautiful (1952), soon to be shown in cinemas across the country. Pauline Kael thought it was ...”

“... exhibition in 2006, and at Tate Modern’s Duchamp, Man Ray, Picabia in 2008. That the pairing may seem a strange one – despite their friendship and collaboration – is testament to the different ways in which both artists have been typecast. The curators are keen to point out that each was mercurial from the start, assuming identities and casting them ...”

“... each patient how tightly they wish to adhere to ‘best practice’, discuss which side effects may be acceptable to them and which wouldn’t, and generally tailor their care as much as possible. The government’s health policy reached new levels of absurdity last October, when it was announced that GPs would be paid £55 for every diagnosis of dementia ...”

“... There is a masked ball where everyone is wearing some kind of bird face, and the avenger, who may at this point just be the faithful old retainer, since all we see of him is his suit, broad, stooped shoulders and magnificently feathered hawk’s head, rather surprisingly performs a few magic tricks, releasing doves into the air from what seemed to be ...”