“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”