“... artists paid attention. After Vien, the representative artists of the new movement were Mengs and David; it was not from literature but from art that André Chénier learned the importance of the buried cities. His work was affected by this knowledge; so was the Anacharsis of the Abbé Barthélemy, published in 1788. Even women’s fashions showed the ...”

“... government.’ The media rallied to his call, and so did less likely allies. The novelist David Grossman went on TV to urge a ‘unity government’ of Likud and Blue and White. ‘Hatred will wait for better days … we need an emergency unity government now,’ Aviv Geffen, a rock star and once a leading peace ...”

“... to comedy shows. Li Dan, creator of the massively popular variety shows Roast (tu cao da hui) and Rock and Roast (tuo kou xiu da hui), was born in Inner Mongolia and arrived in Shanghai determined to shake some humour out of the cold, indifferent, commercial world. Even his way of courting capital is smart. He repeatedly tells his audience that he refuses to ...”

“... suggests, venerated three-sided figures for their vaginal symbolism; Upper Palaeolithic dips in rock are chipped away by cavemen into vulval icons. To Blackledge, more or less anything convex, concave or triangular is evidence of vaginal veneration. Add to that holes and circles. Parallelograms don’t feature, but crosses do. The Knights of the Order of ...”

“... have been appropriate. At Whitby, which is about as far north as he goes, he hears that a lump of rock fell from the cliff onto a local girl seated below, knocking her head off. This would be easier to credit were we not to hear about falling slate decapitating and amputating the limbs of quarrymen in north Wales, or had he not repeated the story of two ...”

“... choosing: as well as Anthony Kennedy, Justices Sandra Day O’Connor, Lewis Powell, Warren Burger, David Souter and John Paul Stevens all did so. For Ginsburg to stay on the court risked ‘disaster’, in Randall Kennedy’s view: ‘The female Thurgood Marshall will be replaced by a female Clarence Thomas.’ Marshall was the first black justice on the ...”

“... an icon of the progressive left like Elizabeth Warren or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. ‘Dumb as a rock’ and ‘low IQ’ – he may be the last person on earth who mentions IQ – had no traction, considering that the stars of MAGA include the congresswomen Lauren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Greene, with their ‘gazpacho police’ and California wildfires ...”

“... on free speech and the ‘fearless pursuit of truth’. Until 2021 he was a member of the folk-rock band Mumford & Sons; he quit following the backlash to the tweet he posted praising the book Unmasked: Inside Antifa’s Radical Plan to Destroy Democracy by the right-wing social media personality Andy Ngo. ‘Winston being cancelled is a big part of why ...”

“... David Lynch’s​ films seemed to come out of nowhere. That’s what he said, anyway. Ideas were ‘little gifts … They just come into your head and it’s like Christmas morning.’ One moment he would be thinking about Bobby Vinton’s 1963 cover of ‘Blue Velvet’; the next thing he knew, a severed ear was lying in a field ...”

“... thought they were getting a sensitive singer-songwriter,’ Elton writes, ‘and instead they got rock’n’roll and Mr Freedom clothes and handstands on the piano keyboard. They couldn’t follow us: we had so much adrenaline … I felt terrible. Sandy Denny was one of my heroes … I scuttled home, absolutely mortified, before they came on stage.’Between ...”

“... can be exaggerated, faked or feigned,’ the psychologists Peter Halligan, Christopher Bass and David Oakley wrote in their introduction to a collection of essays from 2003 titled Malingering and Illness Deception. Medical professionals, researchers and even courts, they went on, were often reluctant ‘to entertain the label or to stigmatise individuals as ...”

“... in the American style, like Malcolm X or Al Capone, Huey Long or Joe Bananas. They were like rock stars, they were in with the press, said to be in with the law: even today, while they lie in jail, the Daily Telegraph prints interviews with them, as if they were as respectable as the Shah of Iran. Dickson mentions ...”

“... and by his passionate support for Paoli’s vain struggle for independence: ‘I had got upon a rock in Corsica and jumped into the middle of life.’ That life was London, where Boswell felt free, appreciated, an accepted member of a brilliant society in which he could expand to his proper intellectual stature. He longed for what he called ‘the juiciness ...”

“... joke being a joker’s mother. I discover in the new revised edition of Ernest Mossner’s life of David Hume that the young philosopher was said to have been in a drawing-room when a dreadful smell broke out, and was blamed indignantly on the dog. But then Hume was heard to say: ‘Oh do not hurt the Beast. It is not Pod, it is Me!’ The story places the ...”

“... in, such as Michael Winner’s Lawman or the Danny La Rue vehicle Our Miss Fred – or, indeed, David Essex’s Stardust. These films were out of reach, but only just out of reach. Forbidden fruit hanging almost low enough to be plucked.I knew that I wanted to read Offbeat as soon as I saw that it contained a chapter dedicated to the history of the AA ...”