“... no longer even figure in the top hundred. Andrew and Robert are barely hanging on. But Joshua, Benjamin, Samuel and Joseph have been restored to the places they held two hundred years ago, after languishing for years in the unfashionable regions of the charts. It is even possible to trace the rise of particular combinations of sounds. The popularity of ...”

“... in the full consciousness of the purity and lucidity of one’s motives (mine are worthy of Benjamin Franklin) one asks one’s self what one is doing in that galère.’ Michael Anesko’s strikingly authoritative ‘Friction with the Market’: Henry James and the Profession of Authorship gives a good many detailed and salutary answers in its ...”

“... He had told the story to his new heart doctor earlier that day, who said it was a myth even then. Black’s Medical Dictionary was now no longer the volume much consulted over breakfast that it had once been. He owned two editions – the 28th (1968) and the 40th (2002). In the first, a stroke is defined as ‘a popular name for apoplexy ...”

“... National Gallery’ and they chose not an Old Master but a huge painting by a living artist, Benjamin West (thereby ‘saving for the nation’ a painting by a North American artist that had in fact been commissioned for a North American institution). The most adventurous collectors of Old Masters in the first half of the 19th century, such as Lord ...”

“... helping to keep white liberal panellists occupied and furrowed until the ferocious later phase of Black Power made them all squirm.) Kazin had been unable to attend the symposium itself but, never one to miss a party, popped into the reception being thrown by Commentary’s editor-in-chief Norman Podhoretz and his wife, the writer and editor Midge Decter, one ...”

“... lose or reduce the extravagance but can’t quite fall for it either. An example would be Walter Benjamin’s wonderful remark about missed experiences in Proust: None of us has time to live the true dramas of the life that we are destined for. This is what ages us – this and nothing else. The wrinkles and creases on our faces are the registration of the ...”

“... between the cotton-pickin’ southern slave states and the northern Yankee country, in which a black man might be free.In form, and in content also, Mason & Dixon is, on a Which?-guide level, many things rolled into one. It’s an epic in ways both obvious and not-so-obvious like the Odyssey, and it’s a simple-hearted buddy story, too. It’s a burlesque ...”

“... But no one doubts that, a pocket still to be mopped up behind borders that already extend to the Black Sea, they will enter it in due course. The great issue facing the Union lies further east, at the point where no vast steppe confounds the eye, but a long tradition has held that a narrow strip of water separates one world from another. No one has ever ...”

“... it was possible on 11 January 2015 for François Hollande, Angela Merkel, David Cameron, Benjamin Netanyahu and three dozen world leaders to assemble shoulder to shoulder at the place de la République, to march twenty abreast with arms interlinked and to chant with the crowd of a million: ‘Je suis Charlie.’A sequel in a lower strain occurred ...”

“... increased access to contraception and family planning. These strategies almost always involve black and brown women in developing countries having fewer babies. There is, of course, an unmet need for reproductive care and birth control in these countries, but we should be deeply sceptical of climate solutions that place the burden of solving the problem ...”

“... at Tannenberg, for example, or the Cossacks dealing with a demonstration, or perhaps the Black Hundreds falling to work in a shtetl – the formative effect would have or might have been different. Yet I think it’s clear, from his own recurrence to the story, and from other evidence, that it was the disturbance to the natural order that made the ...”

“... Granada’. It then moves to 1348 and the massacre of Jews as agents of a conspiracy spreading the Black Death, which unfolded further east towards the Alps. In each case, confessions of a phantasmagoric iniquity were extorted, under pressure of torture. By 1380 the Inquisition was ferreting out Waldensian heretics on the southern flank of the Alps. Soon ...”

“... in the wings: Richard Hell, Iggy Pop, the Ramones. It really was, as the old cliché has it, that black and white. There was no commando unit of primpy stylists for Smith in 1975 – just her, Mapplethorpe and (as related in her 2010 memoir, Just Kids) a few quick shots one afternoon as the New York sun began to dip. One of the reasons the resulting image was ...”

“... Ghost, Gravity’s Rainbow, Underworld – a literature of paranoia offering its own kind of black-magical realism. In Europe, on the other hand, it has been, not the CIA, but the Third Reich and the Judeocide that have polarised historical imagination: Grass, Tournier, Sebald. England, relatively untouched by the Second World War, has generated instead ...”

“... quirkiest testimony to its renown comes in The Habit of Art, Alan Bennett’s play about Auden and Benjamin Britten, when two of the wrinkles come alive and engage in a brief dialogue about themselves. As its furrows gradually deepened, the face was captured by some remarkable photographers, including Cecil Beaton, Richard Avedon and Jane Bown, and a string of ...”