“... his life, work and influence on a variety of artists, from Marcel Duchamp to Michel Foucault, John Ashbery to Georges Perec. I recently spent several months working my way through this enormous archive in the stately gloom of the ornately carved Salon de Manuscrits on the first floor of the Bibliothéque Nationale, just down from the Bourse where Roussel ...”

“... the average manual-working wage-earner had paid no tax at all, by the 1970s a fifth of the gross average wage was being taken by income tax and National Insurance contributions. As both the expectations which voters now had of the Welfare State and the costs of meeting them rose in parallel, so did their unwillingness to have it funded out of their own ...”

“... efficiently.’Energy policy stuck closely to this philosophy in the 1990s and 2000s, under John Major and Tony Blair, but subsequent governments abandoned it. Major reforms in the mid-2010s under David Cameron introduced subsidies for renewables and for gas-fired power stations. The measures were supposed to be temporary, even before Cameron promised ...”

“... Among the critics of Obama’s policies towards the auto industry is the Democratic Representative John Dingell of Michigan, the longest serving member of the House, and a long-time ally of General Motors, Ford and Chrysler. ‘I’m troubled by the different treatment of auto companies … and the treatment of those good-hearted people such as AIG and all ...”

“... the vulgar idea of imitation, as the refined civilised state in which we live, is removed from a gross state of nature’. Burke’s idea of drapery was the one long propounded in Reynolds’s Discourses, whose ‘political theory of painting’, as John Barrell phrases it, was closely bound up with his support of ...”

“... made them laugh. His bodily contours, his fat suggested something alien, animal, Babylonian, gross. So the mob made merry, barracking the enemy barracks-style, so clumsy in manner, so inimical to the eye. Very pertinently, Dionysius puts this alongside Homer’s description of Achilles dragging the dead Hector’s body round Troy. Is there any ...”

“... the State, and Law and Order (1978), written in collaboration with Chas Critcher, Tony Jefferson, John Clarke and Brian Roberts, but with its great and terrifying sweeps of synthesis – not to mention their calm, dry, paddingly Socratic delivery – commonly assumed to be the work mainly of Hall. Everywhere the ‘moral and intellectual leadership’ of the ...”

“... and years!’ The bouncy tone is explained by this being a fantasy of what Baker might say to John Updike in the unlikely event of their finding themselves playing a round of golf together. It was the sure convergence of apparent incompatibles that gave The Swimming-Pool Library (1988) its impact, even for readers who found William Beckwith, the studly ...”

“... not. The king of France, the divines preached, had two bodies. One was a corporeal body, frail or gross; the other was an ideal body, which never died, but was inhabited, as it were, by the next king, who slid into it in a seamless transition. After the execution of Louis XVI, his only living son became Louis XVII. No proclamation or ceremony was needed, no ...”

“... of the usual morose adolescent parables and things like that. The first issue had a foreword by John Wain, the novelist, who had just appeared then and was very famous. I wrote to him to ask if there was some message he could send to youthful aspirants and he did. It was rather good, about half a page, which ended: ‘and, if all this fails, back to the ...”

“... and newspaper headline, impression and chronicle. For the middlebrow modernism of U.S.A., John Dos Passos shrewdly kept those registers apart, offering them separately on the page under the headings camera eye and newsreel. Here they are mashed together, and the effect is distinctly lumpy. There’s a reference to Firbank late in the book and perhaps ...”

“... would have come out just fine. But only a few adventurous souls, and only one reputable economist, John Maynard Keynes, dared to contradict what seemed to be common sense, and even they were hesitant. The central bankers, by contrast, were utterly certain that they were right, just as they are now; and they gave exactly the same advice they are giving now; the ...”

“... Intending only to look at Robespierre, we see ourselves with our own startled eyes, starved or gross, inflated or diminished. Carlyle’s ‘thin lean Puritan and Precision’ scuttles forever through the English imagination. But would he have been recognised by the man who met the Incorruptible strolling in the Bois de Boulogne, wearing a waistcoat ...”

“... We are living through a great era of saint-making. Under John Paul II an industrial revolution has overtaken the Vatican, an age of mass production. Saints are fast-tracked to the top, and there are beatifications by the bucket-load. It seems a shame to have all the virtues required for beatification, but not to get your full name in the Catholic Almanac Online ...”

“... climax of Lord Mayor’s Banquets. Here it becomes a wonderfully funny and poignant image of the gross and mean and unimaginative pleasures that life can bend people to, a ‘dream’-custard. Like the use of the name ‘Theobald’ and of the figure of the servant-girl, the custard-pie is an example of Pope’s grappling with the real stuff of ...”