“... 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 ...”

“... Modern​ Hollywood isn’t really Hollywood – it’s Calabasas. With everyone now the David O. Selznick of his own social picture, gossip replaced with tweets, and fan magazines with selfies, the grandeur of old Hollywood can seem mythical. Like proper myths, its stories are almost exclusively about metamorphosis, self-destruction and things going wrong, but they are at least stories as opposed to advertisements ...”

“... for its Hong Kong airport a 100-metre peak was flattened and 200 million cubic metres of rock moved. On the other hand, nature is abstracted in the ‘Foster’ universe; it has become ‘ecology’, ‘sustainability’, a set of synthetic materials and energy protocols – that is, a fully acculturated category. ‘Foster’ frames this ...”

“... night on stage. Here is Reeves entangled with various young women; here he is falling in love with David Diamond, a composer who was a shadow figure in their marriage. I am thinking of a place called 7 Middagh Street, a fairytale brownstone in Brooklyn Heights whose back windows looked out onto New York Harbour and the Brooklyn Bridge. It was demolished in ...”

“... that would come to him as he worked of standing by his father and watching him pissing on a flat rock. Pissing features a good deal in these pages. It was often the coda to an evening, in bars, on carpets, into fireplaces and countless beds. ‘I can piss on the whole world!’ someone heard him shouting as he sprayed a snow bank in a New York ...”

“... Molineux) long since lost in the mists. The issue also contains a consideration of the sociologist David Riesman, since no intellectual journal back then was complete without a Riesman snorkel dive; a piece by Paul de Man (remember him?) which begins on the stirring note, ‘Ever since the war, American criticism has remained relatively stagnant’; and an ...”

“... of stories, released on the same label, did not require a pundit to explain how a deaf ex-addict rock musician brought back the goods from his twenty-year nightmare of fame and lunacy. A chess-playing wino? That’s another ball-game. The story, in truth, tells itself. Healy’s methods are basically conversational – with a narrative drive that is apparent ...”

“... invigorated, instruction diffused, public burthens lightened, economy seated as it were upon a rock, the gordian knot of the poor laws not cut but untied – all by a simple idea in architecture’ Not just prisons but schools, madhouses, hospitals, reformatories and workhouses – all were erected in the sanguine faith that for every problem there was an ...”

“... of Samuel: estrangement from the prophet leaves Saul with black moods that are only relieved by David’s lyre. But music for Jones’s characters is rarely restorative. Their Vietnam War is not fought against a mythic soundtrack of rock and roll. Only in desperation can the soldier coming to the end of 30 days’ mess ...”

“... in a ‘History of Civilisation’ series, in which it joins such works as Charles Burney and David Marshall Lang’s The People of the Hills: Ancient Ararat and Caucasus (1971) and George Lichtheim’s Europe in the 20th Century (1972). Indeed, the back of Lichtheim’s book announced Lewis’s work as forthcoming, though it then bore the title The ...”

“... His vice was not exclusiveness but a desperate desire that everybody pull together and not rock the boat. A gnawing sense of the worthlessness of worldly success is the starting-point for the adventures. To the Sixties, all this was incomprehensible. John Buchan was either ‘a very odd fish indeed’, as Simon Raven thought, or at least preposterous ...”

“... multisensory experience, with music, dance, costumes and special effects – more like a rock concert than the Royal Court. Isabelle Torrance insists on tragic drama’s deep religious roots. The word tragedy means ‘goat song’, and although we don’t know exactly why, it probably alludes to the drama’s ritual, even sacrificial origins. Robert ...”

“... demonstrations again? Could their growing list of struggles ever cause them seriously to rock the boat? As they come of age, will they steer China in the direction of serious democratic reform, or will they carry on in the Leninist tradition?’ I don’t think millennials have either the drive or the incentive to take action: unlike former ...”

“... Eve, Strange Whisperings of sweet Music thro’ the Air) Here, as with Honey gather’d from the Rock, She fed the little Prattler, and with Songs Oft’ sooth’d his wondering Ears, with deep Delight On her soft Lap he sat, and caught the Sounds. Despite the tourist-guiding the poem attributes to its apocryphal shepherds, readers of Warton drawn to ...”