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“... have paid them homage: the history of music, art, poetry. Dada or Surrealism; the Sex Pistols or Michael Jackson; the Situationist International or – well, if nothing bears comparison with it, few would have any trouble establishing the scale on which to measure the importance of Guy Debord and his band of angels. The comparisons themselves are eloquent ...”

“... book is not the success that its author’s credentials might have led one to expect. Straight political narrative without much of the promised analysis can become fairly dull, and the rather flat and occasionally unclear prose does not help. Some sections of the book bear the marks of haste. Dismantling the Carolingian political world enables her ...”

“... spots is true, and, if we have not remarked the fact as we read, it is for a reason taking us straight to the heart of Christie’s mystery. Her writing is so flat and cliché-ridden and undistinguished that we pay very little regard to it as we forge through the story; if those phrases of Ackroyd’s are oddly stiff it is just a matter of his creator’s ...”

“... Michael Fried, who is also a poet, has a dense, self-questioning, fervent prose style. Somewhat perversely he has, over the last three decades – that is, since his doctoral dissertation on Manet was printed as a special issue of Artforum in 1969 – put this prose to the service of art-historical scholarship. It might have been otherwise ...”

“... curé. With their godless language and habits, their heathen names (Bristol Joe, Streaky Bill and Straight-up Nobby), and their service of the false god Industry, they must be emissaries of that devil’s army the Saint-Simonians. In the final story, ‘Tunnel’, Barnes shows his hand more clearly about interpretation, implying definitely that hermeneutics ...”

“... as its intellectual arbiters, and PEP remained on the fringe, even though its new secretary, Michael Young, put what he could into Labour’s 1945 ‘Let us face the future’. Afterwards, there was no alternative but to switch from being a ginger group to becoming a fully-fledged research institute, in which professional researchers, jealous of ...”

“... world. Booth asked me if I had read ‘Sunday Morning’ by Wallace Stevens. I hadn’t, but went straight to my room and found it in a cheap anthology bought not long before in a thrift store. ‘There is not any haunt of prophecy,’ Stevens writes, ‘nor cloudy palm/Remote on heaven’s hill, that has endured/As April’s green endures.’ Who needed ...”

“... England, for which read English people and English politicians (though two of the worst offenders, Michael Gove and Liam Fox, are Scots sitting for English seats) – is in thrall to imperial nostalgia, has delusions of Great Power status, has never felt itself to be European, has a victim mentality, has a contemptuous attitude to Ireland as its former ...”

“... imagined. As Morris put it in one of his theoretical writings, progress for socialists is not a straight line but a ‘spiral’.In News from Nowhere (1890), Morris wakes in his Hammersmith house to ramble through the decentralised, decarbonised, communist England that has emerged after the revolution of 1952. It is rich with the pleasures of such ‘what ...”

“... the Acropolis: all that stuff they told us about ancient Greece is really true. But Nietzsche goes straight for the counter-intuition. Not how great Apollo is but how great Dionysus must be, if Apollo has to work so hard at his music and ritual and architecture. Not how beautiful these people and this culture are, but ‘how much did these people have to ...”

“... with dagger blows, would retreat from the horror of his life, and throw himself on a gun, to die straight away. Should we say, with the critic Antoine Compagnon, that this is an instance of killing quickly the person one can’t bear to think of killing slowly – that van Blarenberghe horribly literalised and accelerated a common process? This is well ...”

“... you will not be astonished to learn, was ‘grey’ in the opinion of the Bundys.)Now, I know that Michael Ignatieff was aware of the existence of the above correspondence at least a year ago. And I also urged Bird to send it to him. But the Vietnam drama takes up less than a page of his biography, and mentions Berlin’s real positions not at all. We are ...”

“... are worthy of Benjamin Franklin) one asks one’s self what one is doing in that galère.’ Michael Anesko’s strikingly authoritative ‘Friction with the Market’: Henry James and the Profession of Authorship gives a good many detailed and salutary answers in its essential account of exactly what James was doing in his conduct of his career as a ...”

“... for self-publicity: introduce a journalist and Edison would produce a soundbite. Some of them slid straight into the dictionaries of quotations and stayed there, and are still daisy-fresh more than a century later. ‘From his neck down a man is worth a couple of dollars a day,’ he once said. ‘From his neck up, he is worth anything his brain can ...”

“... limited to a small but dedicated following among writers such as Richard Ford, Stewart O’Nan and Michael Chabon. This came ten years too late for Yates, who died of emphysema and complications following minor surgery in 1992. His fiction is closely modelled on his own experiences and, perhaps unsurprisingly, it is a miserable place. The Easter Parade ...”