“... it were America’s white anthem or constitution’, is an overstatement. (It might have been worth acknowledging how differently Julius Caesar has played outside the US, notably among liberationists in Africa – whether performed by Apollo Milton Obote, translated into Swahili by Julius Nyerere, or read on Robben Island by Nelson Mandela.) Perhaps this ...”

“... assembled and from which they are forbidden to go out; the lower slopes of the mountain, to which Aaron and the seventy elders are permitted to ascend and where they share a sacred feast in God’s presence; and the summit of the mountain, where Moses alone may go. Douglas proposes three sets of correspondences to this paradigmatic tripartite structure. The ...”

“... of world-changing talent. It’s true that he put $500,000 into Facebook when the company was worth barely ten times that: in Aaron Sorkin’s The Social Network, Thiel is portrayed as the ruthless suit who realises that the business is one corporate restructure away from hitting the big time. (In Mike Judge’s Silicon ...”

“... wanted a good lawyer: the police officers had even taken his Breitling Navitimer watch which was worth $4000. Jenkins concluded that without Holloway’s help Stevenson wouldn’t be able to afford a decent lawyer, so he tried to break up their marriage by writing her a note that purported to be from a woman pregnant with Stevenson’s child. It didn’t ...”

“... and Mendele Mocher Sforim. But they evidently did not feel that the language was a link to a place worth remembering or to a culture worth preserving. My parents, as far as I can tell, were never curious about the place from which their parents had come, and after the war they felt active revulsion. To Yiddish culture, they ...”

“... that long for this world, it seems, but it’s hard to pinpoint how or when. The full lifetime’s worth of radiotherapy I was blasted with inflamed the fibrosis far more than was expected, but the chemotherapy, a horrible experience in itself, seems to have stopped the development of the tumour. Now I’m more likely to die from fibrosis than cancer, which ...”

“... recall the other face of Saturn, that of the god who devoured his own children; and the murderous Aaron draws attention to the dangerously ‘saturnine’ temperament of those who, like himself, live under the influence of the planet of melancholy; but the play explicitly remembers the Golden Age when a despairing Titus invokes Astraea, the goddess of justice ...”

“... is, after all, one way ‘to bring order into the sum of experience’. Here I think it’s worth quoting a famous passage from Walter Benjamin’s essay ‘The Storyteller’: A man … who died at 35 will appear to remembrance at every point in his life as a man who dies at the age of 35 … the ‘meaning’ of their life is revealed only in their ...”

“... tautologically, as ‘Theory’. Somewhere along the line, art history majors with professors worth their salt will encounter, severally or federated, the critics Yve-Alain Bois, Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, Hal Foster and Rosalind Krauss. This quartet have been working together since the 1970s, and are currently co-editors of the journal October. Founded in ...”

“... from time to time, whether theirs is a case of having missed the boat which would only have been worth catching if they’d been on it in the first place. Perhaps that is why Sinclair gives the impression of his poets as a ship of fools docking for an open day. ‘The work I value is that which seems most remote, alienated, fractured. I don’t claim to ...”

“... the Wars of Independence and finally settled in the district of Tupelo, Mississippi, where Elvis Aaron was born 150 years later. Elvis and Gladys promises much it cannot deliver, nestling uncomfortably between common sense and intuition. But Dundy can be dashing at times. Her description of garage bands in Memphis – where the Presleys moved in search of ...”

“... will hear it repeated to distraction in this quatercentenary year. If one wonders whether it’s worth telling again, well, like the KJB itself, it sells, and good luck to publishers who turn an honest penny by it. This is the Bible which I was brought up to call the Authorised Version – in my parson’s-son sophistication, rather looking down on Americans ...”

“... of Modernism in terms usually reserved for the producers of Hollywood blockbusters, but it is worth bearing in mind that just before Schoenberg discovered atonality he wrote Gurrelieder, the splashiest Wagno-Mahlerian spectacular of them all. For a while, composers were competing to see who could end a work with the most deafeningly over-orchestrated ...”

“... the religion of his fathers, but that wouldn’t necessarily place him, a man of science, in Aaron’s party, having to withstand ‘the angry scorn of the hero’s glance’. In this context perhaps, if you are not a Jew you are an idolator, but what are Freud’s ‘illusory idols’ whom he creeps cautiously out of the church to return to? It would be ...”

“... the West Bank has lost a potential income of approximately $6.4 billion and suffered $3.5 billion worth of physical damage at the hands of the Israeli army. This means, according to the UN Conference on Trade and Development, that the ‘occupied Palestinian territory has lost at least one fifth of its economic base over the last four years as a consequence ...”