“... Many of the 17 ‘essays’ in Barry Lopez’s About This Life are fragments of memoir: snapshots of the day of a mother’s death from cancer; early road trips up and down America; Jesuit prep school in Manhattan; childhood years in California; a tributary career in photography ...”

“... Chatterton’s ‘Battle of Hastings II’, it has a peculiar rightness in Browning’s poem. As Barry Tuckwell, its foremost living exponent, reminds us in his splendid new book, the horn began its history in utterance and has never shaken off its origins. The first horns sent signals across dark forests; they called the clan together, like Ralph’s conch ...”

“... as the mastermind and frontman of a series of current affairs parodies, On the Hour (1991-92), The Day Today (1994) and Brass Eye (1997, 2001). These were notable for their meticulously detailed exaggerations of broadcasting conventions and their cheerful disdain for moral panics and media self-aggrandisement. Brass Eye was celebrated for hoaxing politicians ...”

“... There shall be a day when a shorthand citation like “McMaster 8:279” will be sufficient affidavit for the scholar of the authenticity and location of any quotation of Russell’s written word.’ With this ringing prophecy, William Ready, the General Editor of the McMaster University Library Press and the man who brought the Russell archives to McMaster in 1968, introduced a prospectus of The Collected Essays of Bertrand Russell in Russell, the journal of the Bertrand Russell Archives ...”

“... and for that matter the characters, are monads, each in a separate cell.A short documentary, Day of the Fight, was the first film Kubrick sold to a theatrical distributor, in 1951. A sketch of the professional boxer Walter Cartier, his daily life and training regimen, it concluded with the fight itself, recorded blow by blow. It was praised but led to no ...”

“... lost the mining industry and Ramsgate harbour, which was a big employer,’ the Labour councillor Barry Lewis says, lamenting the repeated blows to Margate over the past forty years. The hotel and tourism industries collapsed ‘when everybody started going abroad for their holidays’. The last big manufacturer in the area was the Pfizer plant near ...”

“... him. He won’t tell them his name or where he lives, and they put him up for the night. The next day he talks a little, tells them his name is Chiron and what his mother’s address is. They take him home. Several critics have suggested that at this point we are waiting for things to go seriously wrong. Juan will abuse the child or sell him. That’s what ...”

“... greyer than the version flourished in early snapshots – the cover of A Serial Biography, the Barry Flanagan etching from Act – but this is still the same mouth, the same disguise. The same bite. The lights are on and there is somebody at home. The speed of eye/ear/mind remains, absolutely, that of a particle accelerator. Heart is everything: the ...”

“... help of images projected on a screen and a ‘conductor’ who would lead them back to the present day (he never actually built the machine). This was a crucial moment in the development of cinema technology, as viewing shifted from individual peepshows to collective projections. Silent films were never silent, and Marcus writes interestingly about the mixture ...”

“... of speech or assembly. But even with civil rights, if you have to struggle to exhaustion every day just to meet your basic needs, freedom of speech or assembly becomes the kind of luxury you rarely get to enjoy. The view that choice is essential to collective welfare seems compelling, on account of the reasonable assumption that if some choice is good then ...”

“... finger down a page and stop. Open your eyes and read what’s written. I had just finished reading Barry McCrea’s first novel and – still slightly dazed and susceptible – asked: ‘What does The First Verse mean?’ I flipped through the pages of the first book that presented itself and found my finger pointing at the following ...”

“... dealings with ponces and other criminals. ‘It was nice to see him get whiter and thinner every day, more ferrety-eyed through lack of sleep ... To everyone’s surprise and to my delight, he kicked the bucket ... When I am feeling low, fortunately not very often, I think that if there is such a thing as everlasting hell-fire, I hope the rotten bastard is ...”

“... a place so small it’s hard to find on any map. ‘Would Kilclooney mean church field?’ I ask Barry as we sit in the bar in the heel of the day. ‘It would, Tomás,’ he says, then instantly produces etymologies and all sorts of words in Irish – way beyond the dozen I vaguely know, and can never pronounce ...”

“... On a typical day​ , John Henry Salter would rise to shoot wildfowl at dawn. A GP in the Essex village of Tolleshunt D’Arcy for 65 years (he died in 1932, aged 91, while still working as the local doctor), he ministered to his patients in the morning, tended his dogs and plants in the afternoon, gave his evenings to committees, and seldom went to bed without completing his diary ...”

“... building, but to see the midget, General Tom Thumb, who was being shown downstairs. On the first day Haydon attracted only four visitors. ‘I would not have believed it of the English people,’ he wrote in his journal, with that absence of insight or humour that makes him such a sad, and at the same time such a tiresome figure. That summer there was a ...”