“... she herself didn’t have the word ‘scene’. She had the word ‘crowd’ instead. ‘It may seem very strange to every one nowadays that before this time Matisse had never heard of Picasso and Picasso had never met Matisse. But at that time every little crowd lived its own life and knew practically nothing of any other crowd.’ This theory lies ...”

“... keep up the morale of politicos and plebs alike. No doubt such folklore is observable, but Wright may be exaggerating Iron Curtainism in retrospect, and conceding too much influence to its relics. ‘Intellos’ and speechwriters have certainly reanimated standard apocalyptic imagery since 2001, but its content isn’t really the same. Nor is any new ...”

“... gone. Like Serbia, the South has founded its identity on a noble defeat; although American film may always be banking on the next blockbuster, the medium itself increasingly looks like a mausoleum of past marvels. In Haskell’s reading of things, at the heart of both the South and Hollywood lies the vanishing vision of a certain kind of ...”

“... of such conflicts, and their last names that their descendants continued to live in this area and may rest in this same ground, next to these woods and these fields covered with rocks they never quite succeeded in clearing. Northern New England is beautiful in the fall. The leaves turn pretty colours and the days tend to be bright and mild. Once the rains ...”

“... ready for it, or at least ready to entertain the thought of its presence. Then we can read, if I may crudely transpose the process: ‘Frédéric bent forward; the parapet seemed a trifle wide to him and the thought of his own sheer weariness stopped him from climbing over.’ The psychology is not all that different. Frédéric is still not serious about ...”

“... reader. Thomas was clear that if something doesn’t involve my body, it doesn’t involve me. I may not be physically present to you on the phone, in the sense of sharing the same material space, but I am bodily present to you all the same. Christianity concerns the transfiguration of the body, not the immortality of the soul. Aquinas certainly believed in ...”

“... dependent on a technology – the codex – which is rapidly being superseded? The explanation may well be this prosaic: Consumed, with its narrative cat’s cradle tightly woven around putatively anthropophagic husband-and-wife French philosophers, wouldn’t be easy to pitch to Hollywood execs. In order for someone to green-light a movie of this ...”

“... read them. Works like this are performances, and even if you don’t want to read every word you may want to watch them in action, as you can on UbuWeb. Seeing him read from No. 109 2.7.92-12.15.93 (1993) – a concrete poem that collects every word ending in the vowel sound / ə / or ‘schwa’ – you’re reminded of his admiring description of ...”

“... no longer applied, and Robert Harley, the brilliant minister who investigated the Memorial, may have been bluffing when he wrote in 1702 that there remained ‘sufficient authoritys given by the Laws in being for suppressing’ seditious print. But new patches were being stitched onto the quilt. Anne’s reign started with a royal proclamation ‘for ...”

“... is the compression of historical time. ‘Is it really fifty years since Sergeant Pepper?’ you may ask. But the time lapse feels immaterial. The internet turns up a perpetual series of anniversaries, disparate moments from disparate epochs, and presents them all as equivalent and accessible in the here and now. ‘In 1981,’ the late cultural theorist ...”

“... the machinations of the liberal elite, when all he means is that Polly Toynbee and Andrew Marr may have had dinner in the same North London restaurant as Jon Snow. He wishes to stir up populist disgust at the idea of a liberal, self-satisfied elite – nice, coming from the back of a chauffeur-driven car or from the gold-plated elevator at Trump Tower ...”

“... more specific about him to put on her form, looked me up and down and wrote ‘executive’, which may or may not have been the case.The hutments, Geraldine explained, were temporary housing. They consisted of single-storey dwellings built, according to a surveyor’s report, ‘with slight weatherboarding’ on the outside ...”

“... And also that the creative artist was in some sense a problem, at least for psychoanalysis. Art may not be soluble in terms of psychoanalysis – it is difficult to see now why anyone should want it to be – but it is interesting to see what kind of object it is for different psychoanalysts, both how they find themselves using it in their writing and what ...”

“... This presupposition is, of course, built into the electoral laws of democratic states: children may not vote, nor may retarded people, nor may animals. Modern democracies are ruled, in effect, by an educational or intellectual élite – consisting of sane adult human beings who have ...”

“... New York, though well-educated. A rapid marriage to a fellow student resulted in an abortion which may have left her unable to have children; there was a powerful Yiddisher momma inside her which displaced itself on the family of worshippers she both needed and resented. After getting in touch with Graves on literary business, she rapidly took in his ...”