“... of his body. ‘I had never before,’ says Barney, ‘seen an adult male standing on agrillaceous rock and rolling his balls minutely around the outstretched palm of his hand.’ Howard Jacobson doesn’t yet know what to do with characters like these. When he does, he’ll be a novelist to reckon with. Henchard in The Mayor of Casterbridge sells his ...”

“... them. I was starting to like my Jimi Hendrix album after all: my unwitting mentors were steeped in rock and roll, folk revival, blues by white and black musicians, and jazz. One had a compilation album, Electronic Music, with work by Berio and Cage, and the Turkish composer Ilhan Mimaroğlu. All this fell under the perplexing heading ‘progressive ...”

“... for crimes they did not commit. Thames TV’s crime was to broadcast the programme Death on the Rock, which questioned the shooting of unarmed IRA members in Gibraltar. The programme, which won an award, was exculpated and praised by an independent inquiry after a terrific huffing and puffing of outrage in which B. Ingham played his usual part. ‘My ...”

“... of the Victorian Liberal Party, many of whose members were much nearer to Mrs Thatcher than to David Lloyd George. But it is the Labour Party, and specifically its left wing, which suffers most severely from myths about a golden past now lost in the mists of time. Even quite well-read Labour politicians are prone to the belief that This Great Movement of ...”

“... Fleet Street, having no interest whatever in ‘last year’s story’ lest that interest might rock the boat. Were the future to reveal similar weaknesses in a Labour Administration Dalyell would doubtless nail them in the same forthright fashion. Critics on his own side may sometimes see him as a ‘bloody pest’, but in reality his self-chosen ...”

“... 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 ...”