“... These opening chapters leave us accepting that Elvis Presley, towards the end of his life, was a gross drug-abusing sybarite with lousy taste (what did we expect?), but wondering what can be the origin of the strange sexy excitement Goldman derives from telling us about it. Why will he not accord Elvis even the status of a male member of the human tribe? But ...”

“... it disturbing that Krauss and Karajan conducted very fine Parsifals, are we subscribing to the gross fallacy Cosima supported from the other side, through her belief that a Jewish conductor (Hermann Levi) could not penetrate the sacred mystery? On the other hand, if we aren’t disturbed, what becomes of Wagner’s idealistic belief that a ...”

“... left enduring scars, especially on the left of British politics. In The Politics of the Judiciary John Griffith provides more recent material to support his thesis that a white, male, Oxbridge-educated judicial élite is not to be trusted to decide the questions which would arise if we had a modern Bill of Rights, broadly defining the limits of state ...”

“... the tales that Rée includes within his metaphysics remind us that Western sensibilities, however gross they may still seem to the more sensitive among us, have changed for the better. The same Castel tells of a prince of Halle (Handel’s birthplace) bored out of his mind until visited by an itinerant musician with a harpsichord guaranteed to cure ...”

“... Parisians could hardly contain themselves during the first season of the Ballets Russes in 1909. John Singer Sargent’s painting, Vaslav Nijinsky in ‘Le Pavillon d’Armide’, captures the long-necked, outrageous spectacle of this new animal of dance. All of Proust’s characters were there in the audience, and they had never seen anything as exotic as ...”

“... ruin of 20th-century literature, Ezra Pound’s Cantos.’ There is a remarkable brief piece on John Huston’s film The Misfits, and the tone changes entirely for two writers who clearly matter a great deal to Coetzee: Beckett and Celan. This is how we learn of ‘the distinctive prose that Beckett, using French models in the main, though with Jonathan ...”

“... bears.’ But it followed equally that anyone, of any race, might shed civilised qualities (“Gross men prefer animal pleasure. So there are men who have preferred living among savages’) or acquire them. The South Sea islander Omai, having been exposed to the ‘best company’, was so ‘genteel’ and had ‘so little of the savage’ that when he and ...”

“... years of Africa as I had months – almost After Casement’s arrest in 1916, Conrad wrote to John Quinn in New York: We never talked politics ... He was a good companion: but already in Africa I judged that he was a man, properly speaking, of no mind at all. I don’t mean stupid. I mean that he was all emotion. By emotional force (Congo ...”

“... His ‘bourgeois cuteness & desire to know where I am’ limited his options. ‘However gross my desires, I fear that I shall never satisfy them for fear of annoying others.’ At the end of 1911 he feels emotionally paralysed and unable to write. In 1912 he has a ‘shamed sense of unused strength’; in 1913, ‘I shall grow queer and unpopular if ...”

“... that in order to bring the nation’s finances under control (in the wake of the 2008 crash, gross government debt stood at 69 per cent of GDP), it would be necessary to reduce government borrowing by £120 billion within five years, to be achieved overwhelmingly by reducing government expenditure: public sector pay would be frozen; welfare benefits ...”

“... by which it can be drawn upwards to love: ‘Ascend through declension/the mass the matter/the gross refinement/gravitas.’ That swirl of ascent and descent through gravity can lead, etymologically, through the Latin pondus, towards pondering, or weighing: ‘imponderables brought home/to the brute mass and detail of the world;/there, by some, to be ...”

“... is in dissent, the senior justice in the majority does the assigning. The current chief justice is John Roberts, who was nominated in 2005 by George W. Bush. Clarence Thomas, the most senior associate justice, was nominated in 1991 by George H.W. Bush. Stephen Breyer was nominated in 1994 by Bill Clinton, Samuel Alito in 2005 by George W. Bush, and Sonia ...”

“... is known, the type of population can be found. Birth and death rates are set down, and then the Gross Reproduction Rate is calculated. Family reconstitution supplies other figures, the proportion of the population married and the age of marriage, but this information is less secure than other types. Like an old building, the total structure has some parts ...”

“... Lowell is only to be so described when he is writing at his lowest ebb and, rather than leave John Berryman out altogether, I have selected work by him which may well though not indisputably be judged unrepresentative – since if poetry is a public matter it is not the place for private revelations, and if it is not a public matter it has no place in a ...”

“... north and south of the border. The impact of these long-term trends was accelerated by a series of gross miscalculations by the largest unionist party, the DUP. In a spectacular act of political self-harm between 2016 and 2019, it tried to use Brexit to roll back the Good Friday Agreement by re-establishing a ‘hard border’, enforced by police and customs ...”