“... on to Marx, Althusser, Poulantzas and Gramsci. ‘Quote marks’ round words, when ‘concepts’ may be ‘novel’. Italics – lots of them – when something is important and the teachers want to make sure you’re getting it down. There had been a Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham University since Richard Hoggart set it up in ...”

“... at 40, Baudelaire at 46. If Baudelaire has never quite attained the hipster cachet of Rimbaud, it may be purely a matter of image. (Which is itself already quite modern.) Before Keith Richards, before punk, here is rock and roll animal Arthur Rimbaud with his anti-gravity shock of lightning strike hair. A queer Pan with italicised attitude, Rimbaud gets the ...”

“... The business imagination has been coming into its own in other ways as well. Management Studies may still be considered disreputable in some quarters of the university, but it is no longer that makeshift department of Nissen huts kept off the well-tended preserves of the traditional academic disciplines. The liberal academy’s green-belt areas are now well ...”

“... have no Geist. And what, pray, is Geist? It is, of course, many things. In the present context, it may be defined as speculative intellect in excess of material facts. In its awareness of this chronic excess (for it is self-conscious through and through), Geist turns either aggressive and destructive, or habitually melancholy, in its attitude to the world of ...”

“... the gallows, which is so placed respecting the town, that the towns people from the High-Street may sit at their shop doors, and see the criminals executed.’ In this passage (brought to my attention by Lincoln Faller, who uses it effectively in his forthcoming book on Defoe), the reader is invited to share the pain of travel, including seeing too ...”

“... that embellished him made him an angel.’ Besides the complexes that blokes in the 21st century may have about castration and the shivering joy many take in explaining all this to a psychoanalyst, there is another reason the castrato may continue to fascinate us. It is the old idea that while heard melodies are ...”

“... years younger, knew Rochester rather better than we or any other of the commentators on his life may be said to have done. In the months that followed his death she was to see her uncle become vastly famous, not as Marvell’s ‘best satirist and in the right vein’ or Shaftesbury’s ‘worthy’, but as a rake of the most rapacious and an infidel of ...”

“... of the best ones, are bent on sin. Simply that (for the present venture in criticism) handling sin may be the right way to take hold of the bundle.’ The seven deadly sins and their antitheses, the four cardinal virtues and three heavenly graces, provide the book’s organising principle. A pair of introductions, ‘Sins, Virtues, Heavenly Graces’ and ...”

“... Fittko, who has no part in Birman’s story, made a preliminary excursion from Banyuls on what may well, it appears from her own memoir, Escape through the Pyrenees (1985), have been the same day. Fittko was a stateless anti-Fascist, an agitator and propagandist, born in Austria-Hungary; she had lived in Vienna, Berlin and Prague and was, by the end of the ...”

“... helped foster a revolution in sexual mores, politics and drug consumption? Schütte thinks they may be even more important than that. ‘Could, for example, techno have emerged from inner-city areas of Detroit without them?’ The link can’t be denied, but it’s something else to claim techno wouldn’t have happened if it weren’t for Kraftwerk. Techno ...”

“... living, however eminent. Take Mike Newell, who wanted Rupert to do a bit of work for the role of David Blakely, the guy killed by Ruth Ellis, the last woman to be hanged in England. Newell wanted to see Rupert’s pain. But, as Rupert himself admits, he was ‘a riddle as an actor. On screen, I had a lot of “feeling” but I couldn’t really act. On stage ...”

“... before Wimbledon and other prized parts of the output go the way of the Premier League and Sir David Attenborough onto better financed channels. That’s not the only difficulty. It is generally reckoned that if the BBC is to justify being the beneficiary of a poll tax, the BBC needs to reach at least 90 per cent of the UK audience, although there is a bit ...”

“... a real interruption, but one which had only recently begun. Most interesting of all, the empire of David and Solomon, whose absolute dates are for special reasons retained, now coincides with the glories of the Canaanite Late Bronze Age, instead of languishing in the apparent squalor of the Early Iron Age It all sounds rather attractive, What will be its ...”

“... habit of making at different stages of their careers. The last factor is more important than it may at first appear. Dickens, it is often observed, apparently embarked on working notes only with his fourth novel, The Old Curiosity Shop (1840-41), and systematised the practice with Dombey and Son (1846-47), his seventh novel. Like other commentators, Stone ...”

“... an idea of synchronicity to which the authors of this volume make only glancing reference. Here we may recall, not only the existence of a long-established world-chronometry such that people in Caracas and Madrid knew they were simultaneously acting out their roles in, say, ‘1627 AD’, but that, in its very essence, time was now ‘man-made’ and ...”