“... heaven! I remember being woken to the rightness of their hyperbole when I found them misquoted in Paul Foot’s Red Shelley, where they become, even in ‘corrected’ editions, Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive And to be young was very heaven. Gone is the intoxicated youthful illogic, by which even ‘bliss’ can be trumped. That ‘And’ as we turn ...”

“... escapism: Rushdie, Grass, Pynchon in his most recent novel, David Foster Wallace, even Zadie Smith. In novels by those writers, we have lately encountered terrorist groups with silly names, a genetically engineered mouse, two clocks having a conversation with each other, a giant cheese, a baby who plays air guitar in his crib, and so on. These kinds of ...”

“... Marxism​ is still very young, almost in its infancy,’ Jean-Paul Sartre wrote in 1957, more than seventy years after Karl Marx’s death. Sartre had first read Marx three decades earlier when he, too, was still very young. At the time, the author of Capital had seemed a figure of merely historical interest. ‘Here are the conceptions of a German intellectual who lived in London in the middle of the last century,’ Sartre remembered thinking ...”

“... The Vegetarian and Human Acts have won startling numbers of readers in the translations by Deborah Smith, in which the underspecification, repetition and starkness of Korean have been, by Smith’s own account and with Han’s full approval, enhanced by ‘occasional interpolations’ after she listened ‘more carefully to ...”

“... It is noticeable that the one outstanding exception, the remarkable work of Jonathan Zittell Smith, a brilliant mind by any measure, should avoid so much as a mention of Weber’s name in connection with his subject. In it comparison alters focus, completely. Taking not only an expressly anthropological approach to the study of religion, but ...”

“... up there with P.G. Wodehouse, in America) is reduced to editorialised sound-bites from a phantom Smith Square manifesto. Two coppers can’t sit down for a swift half without debating the morality of capital punishment. (‘I happen to believe that the death penalty does deter, so what I’m saying is that I’m willing for innocent people to take a greater ...”

“... profession was her voice. She was an assistant professor of oral English at Simmons, Scripps and Smith Colleges, and taught elocution and voice training for actors. Yet speech between Emily and Tom was rare. One opening for talk came when Eliot went to the US to give the Norton Lectures at Harvard in October 1932. He telephoned Hale on arrival. Fortunately ...”

“... the cacophony of what was called ‘Malthusianism’ through the 19th and 20th centuries. Sydney Smith said of the Essay that it was a book ‘much more talked about than read’, both by admirers and critics; certainly the later career of Malthusian thought and commentary breaks free of detailed engagement with the late 18th-century pastiche of moral ...”

“... false – claims in the history of economics. According to orthodox economists as far back as Adam Smith, money originates in the need to exchange one good for another. I have produced more bread than I need, you have produced more clothing than you need, and we need some simple instrument by means of which to swap one for the other. Products and services ...”

“... neo-conservatism – Alan Bloom, Harvey Mansfield, Joseph Epstein, Hilton Kramer, Charles Murray, Paul Craig Roberts, Irving Kristol, even such names for the connoisseur as Richard Cornuelle – they are among the fruits of a mutually beneficial association. For on the one side, there are limits to local supply – the efforts of Conor Cruise O’Brien, ...”

“... can detect echoes of his jaundiced vision in Jordan Peele’s recent horror film, Get Out, and in Paul Beatty’s novel The Sellout. But, as if it were his destiny to remain just beyond the pale of literary approval, Himes, unlike Baldwin, flunks the contemporary ‘woke’ test. As much as he deplored the prejudices of the black bourgeoisie and aligned ...”

“... rehearsal. Ellington had never before performed ‘God Bless America’ (famously recorded by Kate Smith in 1939) and would never repeat this airing. Why did he offer it at Fargo?If you accept Ellington’s truncated ‘God Bless America’ as a delayed coda to ‘St Louis Blues’, it introduces the idea of producing multicultural medleys for regions in ...”

“... Jarman made a note in his diary in April 1989: ‘Since autumn: Terry, Robert, David, Ken, Paul, Howard. All the brightest and best trampled to death – surely even the Great War brought no more loss into one life in just 12 months, and all this as we made love not war.’ In March 1992: ‘We talked of the people who died of Aids this week.’ ‘To ...”

“... for its legitimation; and this Euro-Gramscism is its basis. Some years ago, the American Marxist Paul Piconne predicted that if Marxism is to become a meaningful political force in the West, ‘it will have to follow a Gramscian path,’ and that because Gramsci provides ‘a formulation of Marxism free from all the traditional trappings of orthodox ...”

“... of The Birth of Steel within a few days. The plot tells how a Medieval alchemist – aptly named Smith – is baffled in his attempts to fashion a steel sword: mocked by his minions, he appeals to Minerva, Goddess of Wisdom, who thereupon enters in majesty and introduces the instruments of modern science. The open-air production took full shape during ...”