“... and what a riot we shall have. Not a day shall pass without a fresh horror. Prometheus leaves his rock to cohabit with the Furies. Jack Yeats’s judgments are better-worded than most attacks on the innovative experiments of early Modernist poetry, but they make the same charges that would be repeated, with diminishing persuasiveness, for the next twenty ...”

“... In 1987, David Cannadine concluded an essay on what he saw as the dark and doubtful state of British history with a call to ‘fashion a new version of the national past which can regain its place in our general national culture, and become once again an object of international interest’. A job application posted through the unusual medium of a scholarly journal? I doubt it, but it may be that this essay found its way onto a desk at Penguin Books, leading to Cannadine’s appointment, in 1988, as general editor of the new Penguin History of Britain ...”

“... their dependence on a day-return metropolis. Aylesbury, with its vegetable gardens (its pensioned rock stars), requires a market for its produce. Binding’s fictional family, the Bembos, are implicated in this trade. They travel to Covent Garden. They are parley-speakers from good mountebank stock, not Romanies. The ‘real’ Aylesbury is known for its ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... mother of Solomon, and finally as J, mistress of the sublime and the uncanny as well as of King David. In this new book Bloom cheerfully accepts the reviewer’s proposal. That the author of what eventually became the Torah should have been the relict of the unlucky Uriah, and not an Israelite, but a Hittite, was plainly irresistible. Henceforth, he ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”