“... traveller work by place or by author? That is to say, will he happen to find himself in Blowing Rock, set up his lectern in the market square, then discover from his literary guide that yes-indeedy in this vurry town John Hersey wrote his Hiroshima? Or should we envisage a more dogged, gumshoe type – one who picks an author and then tracks him all the way ...”

“... curling brush trails heading nowhere; wanton drips and splats: all this is not so far from what David Salle, the field leader of ‘postmodern’ painting, was then up to. One form of art-world good behaviour plays off against another: the springy triangular torque generated by the gardeners’ poses is a lesson learned from Old Master figure painting. We ...”

“... pacifying Kandahar or pummelling Gaddafi is somehow essential to preserving their way of life. David Nichols has written a slight, narrowly focused book that provides modest but not inconsequential insight into the origins of America’s involvement in the Greater Middle East. His focus is the Suez Crisis, or more specifically, the way Eisenhower’s ...”

“... by gassing, starvation and lethal injection to their doctors’ ‘aristocratic’ values. David Blackbourn took the lead in dismantling this paradigm. With Geoff Eley, he wrote The Peculiarities of German History: Bourgeois Society and Politics in 19th-Century Germany (1984), which attacked the new orthodoxy on a number of fronts. Blackbourn’s main ...”

“... plate. He wanders off into the back-blocks. Then one day he stubs his toe on a glittering rock that turns out to contain silver and goes on to open the mine that will make his fortune. In this parable, if you can lose yourself and let go of representation, you get lucky. Bail’s first stories are five-finger exercises in the comic futility of trying ...”

“... l i m e n t i I SURE dew agree re/Aiken. Eliot’s low saurian vitality ... when the rock was broken out hopped marse toad live and chipper after 3000 or whatever years inclaustration. For anyone who prefers to concentrate solely on the negative side of the Pound ledger David Gordon’s selection inevitably ...”

“... here he was, tanned, yoga-fit, like the unofficial leader of a libertarian party: legalise dope! Rock ’n’ roll and free phone-calls. A late-night TV pundit, a wrinkly hero at Megatripolis, wowing the non-voters, the under-age certainties. While the wobbling jogger, Bill Clinton with his Airforce One, on-board haircuts costing thousands of dollars, his ...”

“... music should express the general anxiety. I: the more the sea rages, the more precious a hard rock among the waves becomes. He: but no one will understand the meaning of this rock; besides, what is this feeling of calm based on – on health, self-assurance, individual personality? I: on the emphasis on God. He ...”

“... one thing: the manufacture of The Who. It is in his promotional and creative work on behalf of a rock band that father-and-son symmetries are unexpectedly conspicuous: ‘The qualities that Constant found in the ballet were those that Kit adapted and magnified in the band. Their performance required different forms of expression to be mingled; they combined ...”

“... New Hampshire in 1823. He had a tamping iron driven through his head while his men were blasting rock to lay new track for the railroad. He lived; he should not have lived; it made him famous. We do not even know his birthday, but we know the accident occurred around 4.30 p.m., and our documentation of his case from then onwards is so extensive that it seems ...”

“... so far rightwards that it isn’t really the same party any more. In that process of migration, David Blunkett was one of the key players. Blunkett is important not only because of how he behaved when in office – we’ll get to that in a moment – but also because of the journey he took to get there. A man who from 1980 to 1987 was the leader of the ...”

“... regular invitations from the community of particle physicists who admire my films as much as rock musicians, skateboarders and various other enthusiastic denominations do.’ Herzog likes to insist that a director should be more of an athlete than an aesthete and, perhaps as a result, the memoir devotes a great deal of attention to the human body in ...”

“... immediately after the war, conditions in Britain, especially in the cities, were pretty grim. As David Kynaston tells it, people were exhausted, low in spirits, their resources depleted, and over everything there hung the threat of another, probably terminal war. The dawn of the postwar era was cold and dark and bleak, but there was a touch of pink in the ...”

“... rate rise was a consequence of the decision to exchange the relatively worthless Ostmark for the rock solid Deutschmark at the deeply patriotic rate of 1:1, thereby absorbing the former and temporarily weakening the latter. So Thatcher was right – German reunification did spell big trouble for the UK – but for the wrong reasons. She didn’t foresee the ...”

“... and find it wanting – Cardew was excited by the alternative that they appeared to offer. David Tudor, Cage’s pianist and pupil, was an important new influence, as were other American composers like Morton Feldman, Earle Brown and La Monte Young. He even contemplated emigrating to the United States. Cardew returned to London to digest these ...”