“... should be represented, whether by loan or by purchase, was drawn up by her chief adviser, Herbert Read. According to Guggenheim, it was later revised by ‘Marcel Duchamp, Nelly van Doesburg and myself because it contained so many mistakes’. Works by many of the artists on the list were acquired in Paris just before the outbreak of the Second World ...”

“... ignorant verve he wanted as a painter and that he strove to portray in person. He knew and had read plenty, but preferred to play the innocent, the observant but befuddled immigrant who could manifest his naivety in the act of denying it: ‘I’m not a – how do you say that? – country dumpling.’ Among the most suggestive aspects of Krauss’s ...”

“... from the upstairs window of a house overlooking the site, issued a warrant for Hunt’s arrest and read the Riot Act, though it is unlikely that anyone heard them. Shortly after the meeting started at one o’clock, the Manchester and Salford Yeomanry cavalry (consisting of volunteers recruited from local publicans and shopkeepers) charged into the ...”

“... how the Paras’ reputation fell further during the rest of the 1970s. ‘Paras = evil bastards’ read one piece of graffiti in Belfast; at the same time, dozens of these supposedly elite soldiers were killed in IRA ambushes. In 1977 – because of defence cuts, and because of their unpopularity with the rest of the army – the Paras were reduced to three ...”

“... demands on parliamentary time if such a compulsion still operated). In Rudd’s, if she hadn’t read the figures, she ought to have. But they all had to go. Now ministers stick like barnacles to their ministerial posts, with Johnson’s encouragement. Under previous PMs, the home secretary, Priti Patel, would have had to go for being officially found guilty ...”

“... and innuendo. His main characteristic was cynicism. And yet his friends included Ronald Reagan, Donald Trump, Norman Mailer, Barbara Walters (they almost married), Cardinal Spellman, nearly all the top Mafia people, Richard Nixon, Si Newhouse, Rupert Murdoch, Frank Sinatra, J. Edgar Hoover, William F. Buckley, an endless list of Congressmen and judges and ...”

“... classic status in the MUD community. It was first printed in the Village Voice in 1993 (you can read it, free of charge, in the April edition of the Net magazine, Imaginary Realities). It describes the repercussions in a Social MOO (telnet ‘lambda.moo.mud.org’) of a sexual rampage perpetrated by a ‘Mr Bungle’. Specifically, he raped a number of ...”

“... Soviet Union, or elsewhere in Eastern Europe, appears to be unavailable to the Scots. I met or read no one who appealed to ethnicity: not surprisingly, since Scotland has been ethnically mixed up for centuries; no one who appealed to religion (Scotland’s most vigorous religion is Catholicism and the churches of its official religion are badly ...”

“... his advice for some part of their careers is impressive. It includes J.V. Cunningham, Thom Gunn, Donald Davie and Robert Pinsky, all of whom have paid tribute to his teaching. Many of them went further in the direction of Modernism than Winters would have liked. Davie, for example, spent much of his life championing Pound, yet nearly all his books include ...”

“... with the Black Mountain school, an identification sealed by her inclusion under that heading in Donald Allen’s 1960 anthology The New American Poetry. The lone woman in a lupine contingent, she was glad to make common cause against the so-called ‘closed’ poetics of Eliot and his successors, but her experimental sympathies stopped there. At a time when ...”

“... India beyond reading a few published memoirs of ICS officers. She has not gone to the archives to read private diaries and letters that might have given her a richer insight into the matter. Nor has she gone to the unpublished official correspondence, from which she would have learned how policy was made and legislation prepared. Men joined the ICS for a ...”

“... The President himself may sometimes forget to chew, but the Vice-President, Condoleezza Rice and Donald Rumsfeld would have been quick to spot the opportunities presented by the crisis. Doubters need only think of Jo Moore, Stephen Byers’s adviser, who got into trouble for suggesting that the attack on the World Trade Center provided a perfect opportunity ...”

“... listening to the murmur of the artificial stream and imagining myself knee-deep in a real one, I read that Pornhub, as its answer to the Covid-19 crisis, was offering its lubricious content free to the over-sixties. Right age, I thought, wrong offer. Fishing videos are my porn: all those voluptuous, writhing, saftig trout, the babes of the fast water ...”

“... and Revolution (2015) was a monumental study of his namesake and compatriot Edmund Burke. He has read widely and deeply in Hegel – not for some of us the most enthralling way of passing the time – and has a daunting command of the field of modern European political thought. Currently professor of the history of political thought at Cambridge, he started ...”

“... through in his disputatious works: ‘I mean not to dispute Philosophy with this Pork, who never read any.’ Certainly he knew too much about more or less everything. He was steeped in classical poetry and almost every line he wrote is in close conversation with one source or another. His relationship to Ovid, beautifully explored in a recent book by Maggie ...”