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“... 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 ...”

“... schools. In their collection of essays on 12th-century Latin, The Tongue of the Fathers (1998), David Townsend and Andrew Taylor confirmed Ong’s insight. Latin discourse, they wrote, ‘endlessly replicates tradition. It upholds a monological and orthodox consensus … To enter into this language is, par excellence, to enter into patriarchy. Medieval ...”

“... opinions married to a successful businessman. (Florence’s mother has been a friend of Elizabeth David and is a friend of Iris Murdoch.) Both stories are set at a very precise date, with debates about socialism, Britain’s decline as a world power, and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Both works exude a sense, alive in McEwan’s work since The Child ...”

“... I made another personal discovery: Stuart’s mother was descended, through her mother, from John Rock Grosset, a pro-slavery Tory MP who owned a plantation in Portland. Further questions arose. What, beyond simple economic interest, turned people into active pro-slavers? What were they afraid of? How did they hope to stem the tide of abolitionism? How should ...”

“... that politics sometimes enters into politics. He says he was reluctant to nationalise Northern Rock because it would have meant a very bad deal for the British taxpayer. He doesn’t admit that he was terrified of anything that might look like a reversion to the bad old days of socialism. When he agreed before the 2010 election to take part in the ...”