“... than 9; Tony Benn is leader of the opposition; the Poll Tax has been introduced a decade early; John Lennon is still alive; and personal computers have already been around for twenty years or more. Intercity trains are fast (London to Glasgow in 75 minutes) because Thatcher is ‘fanatical about public transport’, but the trains themselves are ...”

“... shows a murky sea bottom with a section of tube that looks like marine junk. Here, as the curator John Jacob points out in his excellent essay in the Smithsonian publication, Paglen works against the obfuscation of terms like ‘cyberspace’ and ‘the cloud’; in his own words, Paglen aims to ‘rematerialise the network’ and thereby ‘to expand the ...”

“... Kavanagh the ex-poet ran into me soon after I came home, and the following conversation took place exactly as recorded. k: I see you do be writing for a paper called the New Yorker. me: I do. k: I dare say for a piece in a paper like that you might get big money. me: Begod, you might. k: I dare say you might get $500. me: You ...”

“... the centre of Chichester, where the Seven Deadly Sins had staked out appropriate shops (Gluttony took over the Real Cornish Pasty Company); in the cathedral, the damnation of Samuel West’s Faustus was staged at the high altar. But since the first half of the play was staged in the Minerva Theatre, it still only played to a maximum of three hundred ...”

“... system as it struggles to grow fast enough to accommodate increases in numbers. Yet that expansion took place relatively smoothly and without much evidence that quality was sacrificed to quantity. Difficult categories of young people have been incorporated into the system. For example, not very long ago, severely handicapped children were considered ineducable ...”

“... picketing, striking, rioting. And thousands went further, especially after Bloody Sunday, and took up the gun. Even with hindsight, I cannot say that Republicans who resorted to arms were acting ‘irrationally’: their response bore a clear relation to the actions of the state against their communities. Looking through newspaper articles of the time, I ...”

“... Disraeli, mightily put out at the send-up of Coningsby, never spoke to Thackeray again and took his revenge in a later novel. Friends of Thackeray told him that he was losing caste as a novelist by working for Punch, but he needed the money badly – Vanity Fair did not come out until 1847. The Fat Contributor’s finances plummeted when he lost £500 ...”

“... Small, Good Thing’. I think that they did a good job too. KB: A few weeks ago I saw the film of John Cheever’s ‘The Swimmer’. RC: Isn’t that just a wonderful film? I saw it when it first came out, and I talked to John Cheever about it. We were teaching together in Iowa. He claimed he just ...”

“... arrogant display of budget that speaks of royal visitations, the finish of the London Marathon, or John Major on walkabout, prospecting for inner-city blight. But on this unearned, mint morning, the fuss is all about real royalty, indigenous royalty: one of our local princes of darkness, a cashmere colonel, is about to be boxed. A mob of expectant necrophiles ...”

“... community. On arriving in New York, Phebe and Mary went to live with the Broadway tobacconist John Anderson, doing domestic work in exchange for their board. Later, Mary went to work in Anderson’s shop. It was here that she began to be called ‘The Beautiful Cigar Girl’ and became a well-known figure to men involved in the marketing of words and ...”

“... shorts and a T-shirt and began to walk. She walked five miles, seven miles, ten, however long it took to fill two hours exactly. At no later than ten minutes past nine she had two cups of coffee and one papaya, no more. She spent the two hours between ten and noon downtown, not exactly shopping but allowing herself to be seen, establishing her presence. Her ...”

“... are far enough advanced to canonise ‘science fiction by Kilgore Trout ... The poetry of John Shade ... The one and only Don Quixote by the immortal Pierre Menard.’ It’s a bit reminiscent of the hybrid Russian-American world Nabokov invented for Ada. Here, John Kennedy wasn’t shot in Dallas but years ...”

“... web-slinging white nigger’, Jeff Winbush proclaimed in The Comics Journal in 1995) took so long to be given a flattened and universalised Hollywood rendering. Or why, now that he has been given that treatment, so many forty or thirtysomething men of a certain type (I mean, like myself) are bearing down with such emotional intensity on the ...”

“... and Edmond Halley, those grandees of the Royal Society, and on the other the Astronomer Royal, John Flamsteed, the doyen of the Royal Observatory at Greenwich. Johns levels the same complaint against historians of science as against Eisenstein: that they take the subject ‘outside history’ and miss the struggles, practical as well as ...”

“... to rethink attitudes towards America. The idea of the US as a global policeman, which now took root, was not simply an acceptance of the inevitable. The arrival in the White House of Bill Clinton, who talked the language of human rights, gave it further credence and that was followed by the war in the Balkans, the re-emergence of ethnic cleansing in ...”