“... 9 million. That’s not nothing; the show has deservedly become an institution. But institutions, grand as they are, are not the same as hits, and a little repair work was obviously needed through another medium. Apparently the punters and producers didn’t expect the movie to do that well, and would have been happy with opening weekend receipts of $30 to ...”

“... who seems to have been both for and against the armistice, expertly and unctuously represented by David Thewlis in his Harry Potter schoolmaster mode, and who appears to Diana as the god himself, levitating, changing forms and throwing thunderbolts. Finally, and this is probably the film’s low point, he abandons all pretence of being anything other than a ...”

“... VOCs in most oils are benzene toluene, ethylbenzene and xylene.When I went out on the sea from Grand Isle, which is hardly more than a great sandbar at the end of the watery land south of the city, 109 miles from it by car, the taste was much stronger, and one of my companions on the boat had run into far worse. Drew Wheelan, a birdwatcher from the ...”

“... in Russia, Greece, Poland and Hungary, as well as Taiwan and Iran. The other prominent declinist, David Thomson, wasn’t even convinced of that. The only director in Sontag’s contemporary pantheon who featured in the edition of Thomson’s Biographical Dictionary of Film that I owned was the oldest, Theo Angelopoulos, and in his entry Thomson lamented that ...”

“... Gold Cup is the most important race in the steeplechase calendar, less well known than the Grand National but more prestigious. (The Grand National is a handicap, which means the best horse doesn’t often win: the better you are the more weight you have to carry, making it more of a lottery; the Gold Cup is run on ...”

“... it: ‘In a less confused world, his glory would be greater than his guilt.’ In a similar mood, David Thomson published a biography in which every chapter ends with a dialogue of self-examination by the critic, and in which Welles’s best-known innovation is side-swiped and helped to its feet all in the course of a sentence: ‘In truth, there was more ...”

“... thanks to propaganda campaigns spearheaded by Bullingdon Club toffs like Boris Johnson and David Cameron, underwent significant revision. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, when the horse path alongside the Regent’s Canal was mud, and forbidden to pedestrians and cyclists alike, I rode to my gardening job in Limehouse on a market wreck bought for ...”

“... where they dine with his new colleagues from Brandeis. Sontag has given birth to a son, David. She studies for masters’ degrees in literature and philosophy at Harvard. Herbert Marcuse boards in their house. The tone is one of new maturity in a high-toned world, but there are also floods of tears, feelings of imprisonment, the need to die or ...”

“... worked hard at this, seeking to erase the memory of the terrifying 1797 mutinies by holding a grand victory parade in London (at the risk of being criticised for aping the public spectacles of the French Revolution), and hiring the theatrical impresario Charles Dibdin to compose patriotic songs about saucy, lovable and brave sailor lads. The essays in ...”

“... of Michel Foucault. It is a suggestive coincidence. The one an exemplar of humanism, the other a grand exponent of anti-humanism, they are about the best in the way of writers their two countries have lately produced, and at their death they seemed to leave as great a hole. Larkin, as a poet of humanistic genius, was actually something quite rare (Whitman is ...”

“... a bad thing? Is it possible that the buildings themselves are complicitous, no longer offering the grand head-on, Neoclassical façades for simple reproduction (see, for example, the magnificent Richard Pare collection, Photography and Architecture 1839-1939)? Photography would then be co-operating in the actual construction of the newer buildings, angling ...”

“... but it did not fundamentally change its course. Like that of his longer lived contemporary David Jones (born five years after Rosenberg, in 1895), Rosenberg’s writing displays a sense of the continuity between a past passionately experienced through poetry and spiritual tradition, and a nearly intolerable present. Rosenberg’s parents were Russian ...”

“... Franzen, an apostate from their ranks, helped make the ex-theorist schlub a stock character. David Foster Wallace, a true believer of sorts, envied Dostoevsky’s pre-postmodern sincerity. Then everything seemed to get turned round and I was suddenly too old to be able to speak with confidence about the totality of Western culture, or to police an ...”

“... and humans, André Leroi-Gourhan on the role of technology in evolution – are reluctant to draw grand conclusions about deep history. Perhaps their appeal lies simply in the fact that they provide no easy affirmations about human nature and progress, and no utopian solutions to contemporary problems. Rejecting Jung’s theory of an unmoored collective ...”

“... stretching upwards, but perhaps true ambition has a pair of silent claws. None of us identified David Cameron as the boy marching inexorably towards Downing Street. When he became Tory leader in 2005, I had difficulty recalling him: wasn’t he that affable, sweet-faced, minor fellow at the edge of things? I remembered him as quite handsome, with the ...”