“... Pet Sounds that I felt truly transported. Between July 1965 and April 1966, the 23-year-old Brian Wilson wrote, arranged, produced and sang on songs including ‘Don’t Talk (Put Your Head on My Shoulder)’, ‘Caroline, No’, ‘I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times’ and ‘God Only Knows’. All around three minutes long or a bit less, they can make you ...”

“... Businessmen made money and politicians won elections by claiming to be on the side of the people. Wilson, Thatcher and Blair all defined themselves against an old ruling class. Entrepreneurs cultivated a demotic image; government asserted a new openness. But the rich got richer, more official information was concealed and more civil liberties restricted. The ...”

“... to obtain Coleridge’s seminal book on Shakespeare, as one could obtain Shakespearean Tragedy or Wilson Knight’s The Wheel of Fire, one would have some difficulty. Characteristically, Coleridge never got around to publishing it. The major early printed sources, both of them highly corrupt texts dating from after his death, were a sampling of notes, reports ...”

“... up with the 19-year-old Princess Anne: Tyrrel borrows from another royal biographer, Christopher Wilson, the speculation that ‘it was to Andrew’ that Anne ‘surrendered her virginity’. It wasn’t that Camilla was worried he might marry Anne (Andrew was Catholic and therefore out of the question) but that he had bagged the most high-profile catch ...”

“... Volume One of Anthony Burgess’s autobiography, Little Wilson and Big God, left our hero in January 1960 under sentence of death, no more than a few months to live. With one bound, or at least one letter from the Neurological Institute, he is free. ‘The protein content of my spinal liquor had gone down dramatically’: the death sentence is cancelled ...”

“... story but that scarcely renders it safe, for Venus is the active party, Adonis the pursued. As Jonathan Bate says, the poem is partly about a woman who wishes to rape a man and is frustrated by physiological difference. The magisterial Jonson, in his play Poetaster, drew the moral conclusion: if that is what Ovid is really like, then Ovid must go, and ...”

“... Jonathan Meades, for the last thirty years Britain’s most consistently surprising and informative writer on the built environment, has finally published a book on the subject. A volume did appear in 1988 – English Extremists, written with Deyan Sudjic and Peter Cook, celebrating the postmodern architects Campbell Zogolovitch Wilson Gough – but since then his medium has been television ...”

“... vile conditions, but for supermarket meat it is the norm by a colossal margin. In Eating Animals, Jonathan Safran Foer noted that there wasn’t enough ‘non-factory chicken produced in America to feed the population of Staten Island’. Farmageddon states that ‘99 per cent of broiler chickens in America’ are reared in the worst kind of processing ...”

“... devise versions of frequency hopping. A prototype of the system is mentioned as early as 1905 in Jonathan Zenneck’s book Wireless Telegraphy, and the Polish engineer Leonard Danilewicz was working on something similar in 1929. But it is still pretty jaw-dropping that Lamarr, who left school at 16, should have come up with the essential concept by ...”

“... by authors who save their best efforts for quite different sorts of writing. They may, as Jonathan Raban’s title suggests, be working for love as well as money, and it is easy to understand their wish to give their best work in this kind a more permanent form. Raban has some engaging remarks on this subject. As he says, very few people can now make ...”

“... Jonathan Rée takes some tomfoolery from Shakespeare for his title and uses it to create his own striking metaphor. The middle part of his book is about sign languages for the deaf: voices that one sees. The same trope served Oliver Sacks in Seeing Voices: A Journey into the World of the Deaf (1989), but there is more to it than that for Rée ...”

“... of hostile bankers, businessmen, judges and media moguls ‘blew them off course’, as Harold Wilson put it. When the Tories are in office, all those bankers and businessmen and judges are their friends. There’s no need or inclination to blow them off course. Then suddenly comes Norman Lamont’s shock claim, greeted by prolonged and fervent ...”

“... is always stimulated to an astonishing degree by clever blackguardism’) he hired Lockhart and Wilson, a couple of Scottish lawyers as blackguardly as they were cynical. ‘Wilson was tall, burly, fair-haired, florid-complexioned, gregarious: Lockhart small, dark, atrabilious, conspiratorial.’ What does that sentence ...”

“... do more harm than it has to. This is a painful matter, especially for anyone who admires Angus Wilson’s novels very much, and who believes that it is with the best of intentions that he plotted and plaited what turns out to be a nouement. But the road to this particular Hell Fire Club is paved with good intentions, and the primrose path is made no less ...”

“... certain spooks or ex-spooks of plotting – effectively or otherwise – to bring down Harold Wilson. It was certainly not – on its own – evidence of mental illness on Wilson’s part. MI5 was bound to be a likely suspect: highly secretive, socially exclusive, largely unaccountable, right-wing, reputedly clever, and ...”