“... shows such as The Simpsons, The Sopranos, Seinfeld, and discussed, with much enthusiasm, in Steven Johnson’s book Everything Bad Is Good for You: Why Popular Culture Is Making Us Smarter.* As Johnson explains, the key to these new markets is syndication, selling the same thing over and over on different platforms; and the ...”

“... Boeing X-37 robotic spacecraft. When asked about this, the second in command of the space force, David Thompson, said: ‘We don’t need to tell the world everything we’re doing.’ The US hasn’t yet made what aerospace analysts call the transition from ‘space operators to space warfighters’. But the vice chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of ...”

“... English muffin’. GET IT DONE. Beyond the underpass with the satiric graffito of Boris Johnson shovelling shit for St Patrick’s Day, I crossed a set of ancient tracks, the Thamesmead Ridgeway and the Green Chain Walk. Here was the first indication I had noticed of a cult of neo-paganism. Under a shiver of leaf shadows, 1960s blocks with balconies ...”

“... chosen policy. The key event here is the Richard Wilson exhibition of 1982-3, organised by David Solkin, whose thoughtful and carefully researched catalogue attempted to situate Wilson’s landscapes in a range of historical contexts including the moral and political ideas and ideals attached to the ownership of land in the 18th century. Editorials in ...”

“... heritage of these arguments in forgotten black authors whose works he resurrects. Beginning with David Walker’s Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World (1829) and Hosea Easton’s Treatise on the Intellectual Character and the Political Condition of the Coloured People (1837), he surveys some two dozen texts, erudite and eccentric in turn, compiled by ...”

“... in responding to the challenge. Writing in the last issue of this review, the American philosopher David Hoy gives courteous attention to Hartman’s redemptive strategy. But he remains sceptical about Derrida’s influence and, in the last resort, dismissive of his claims. For him, Derrida practises a ‘recognisable genre’, that of bringing philosophy to ...”

“... a collection of essays that examine the physical and mental injuries inflicted by the civil wars, David Appleby addresses the problem of wandering soldiers. These were disbanded veterans, deserters and escaped prisoners of war, who frequently clashed with civilian communities as they tried to make their way home. Some didn’t have a home: the majority of ...”

“... direct a Mafia film called Donnie Brasco. The producers were Barry Levinson and his partner, Mark Johnson. We had first met when Levinson, Alan Parker and I had dinner in London. It was a wonderfully smug affair: the last three films we had directed, Rain Man, Mississippi Burning and Dangerous Liaisons, had between them received 23 Oscar nominations. Levinson ...”

“... analysis of the essential virtues – or vices – of his poetry has not really altered since Dr Johnson, whose definition of metaphysical wit as a discordia concors remains central. It just depends on whether you – or your times – like it or need it, or not. Donne was a succès d’estime in the early to mid-17th century, was disliked in the ...”

“... she called it. The English language isn’t keen on the ineffable – in his book on translation David Bellos memorably says that ‘everything is effable’ – but it does recognise mystery when it has to, and it once allowed us, Diski says, ‘a neat phrase’ for ‘the mist in our minds’: ‘I know not what.’ The phrase ‘works fine in ...”

“... control of its destiny. Eventually segregation was undone by the legislative efforts of Lyndon Johnson, the first Southern senator to make it to the White House in a hundred years. LBJ saw that breaking with his former colleagues was the way to cement his national electoral appeal. He did what FDR couldn’t: he undermined the South from within. ‘If ...”

“... of the voters had left their quiet houses, voted ‘No’, gone home and shut the door. At seven David Cameron was on the radio. He intoned the words ‘our United Kingdom’ so many times I thought I’d be sick. Whose United Kingdom? Theirs. The Eton Mess and their cronies. Big Business. Neocons. The warmongers. Not ours. We left Edinburgh at ...”

“... the ear with some splendid novelty than awaken those ideas that slumber in the heart’ – Samuel Johnson, who in a page or two of unanswerable analysis clarifies the reasons why a poet whom he both loved and respected could not conceal ‘the difficulty which he found in exhibiting the genuine operations of the heart’. The key word is ...”

“... of literature in our time. Its two predecessors, The Imaginary Library (1982) and Samuel Johnson and the Impact of Print (first published in 1987 as Printing Technology, Letters and Samuel Johnson), which were issued by a different publisher, were less sourly jokey and less apocalyptic. The first in particular ...”

“... with video games might find that plausible, but a very different picture emerges from Steven Johnson’s book Everything Bad Is Good for You (2005). According to Johnson, the sophisticated video games of today (unlike the simplistic Pac-Man-style games of yesteryear) involve richly imagined worlds with their own hidden ...”