“... Stretch him out longer.’ Tough? It sounds like an absurd American misprint: Lear played by John Wayne. We have been brought up to read ‘rough’. But there it is in the Wells and Taylor Oxford Shakespeare. Can it be right? In the OED I find the first date for tough = ‘hard’ as 1619. Well, I can see that twenty years here or there is no great ...”

“... was an untapped market for ‘erotic fiction written by women for women’ – Femporn. Since John Cleland, men have written pornography for men under female pseudonyms: a tradition which had been continued by Nexus. But this would be the real thing. The Black Lace imprint was launched in July 1993. It has been a success. Between two and three million ...”

“... of the country. Riggs puts together Marlowe’s atheism and his spying to make of him (I quote John Gross) ‘the eternal rebel’; he reads the Tamburlaine plays, a wildly successful strip-cartoon in blank verse, as an engine of social criticism, and supposes that Marlowe’s death was personally procured by the queen, scandalised by his violation of ...”

“... of years earlier, Sticky My Fingers, Fleet My Feet, a short film I’d written with the director John Hancock about touch football in Central Park, had been nominated for an Oscar. (It played with Woody Allen’s Bananas at New York’s Baronet Theatre to brisk business.) In a giddy moment, we’d even taken out one of those bow-wow fuck-off ads in Variety ...”

“... Hendrick Avercamp (1585-1634): A Standing Man Watching a Skating Boy No doubt, in a year or two, this child will be gone; rumours of war in the air and boys at that age always impatient for something. The wide road that leads to the pond runs all the way out to the press gang – you can almost taste the glare of blood, the panic in the ranks, the dead laid out in seams of fire or lye (thus have they loved to wander; they have not refrained their feet); but, for now, he is safe; and the father admits to a moment of guarded pride, which is never quite free of misgiving (look at how close he stands to where the boy is balanced on his skates, a kind of beauty in the act of concentration ...”

“... In the piece by David Bell elsewhere in this issue, a number of lines from an 18th-century French poem are quoted fearlessly in the original. At one time, the question of whether or not to translate them would never have arisen, the editors of a paper like this assuming that a sufficiently high proportion of its readers were comfortable with French for a translation to be both patronising and redundant ...”

“... After my fall from the 16th floor my bones were lovingly assembled. They were transparent. I was carried into the gorgeous dollhouse and placed on a fainting couch upholstered with brilliant poppies. My ship had come in, so to speak. There were others, lovers, sitting and speaking nearby. ‘Are you the Countess of C?’ I demanded. She smiled and returned her gaze to the other ...”

“... the French Republic. Just before the arrests, an English medical student studying in Edinburgh, John Edmonds Stock, had been sent down to London by Watt with a letter to the London Corresponding Society inviting them to mount a similar insurrection. Hearing just in time that he was a wanted man, he disappeared, to resurface later in Philadelphia, where he ...”

“... in a way that could not be done with real American poets – Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, John Ashbery. She even places Lowell inside a critical trope. ‘The New Critical doctrine that every poem is a little drama built around a central paradox is ... in the very fabric of their lives ... especially Lowell, whose life is the emblem of New Critical ...”

“... institutions are debated more widely and more knowledgeably. Both Jonathan Steele’s book and John Gray’s essay sharpen a critique which has so far been fragmentary and diffuse. They articulate deeply-felt arguments against the type of reform Russia is undergoing and warn of the dangers of social upheaval if it continues in the same way. Both writers ...”

“... We live in an age, or if not an age a country, where seemingly novel disorders of the mind or body are given names that leave you in no doubt as to their novelty. Who would have thought, for example, that the 18th-century shooter of lines, Baron Munchausen, would one day have his place on the list of state-of-the-art ailments as the patron of something called Munchausen’s syndrome by proxy? This is not the snappiest form of words that diagnosticians have at hand to scare a patient with; indeed, it trips so uneasily from the tongue that you wonder how often it actually gets said when the professionals confer on what they take to be cases of it ...”

“... In your average bookstore, the volumes stacked by the dozen and sold under the heading of Self-Help are liable to be found quartered in the same part of the building as those falling under the less obviously improving rubric of Philosophy. It’s a little hard to see why, in the present age, when Philosophy has wrapped its professionalism aloofly around it and sneaked off down the corridor into the seminar room, casting sufficient doubt as it retreats from view on the mere existence of a self to make the notion of Self-Help seem at best paradoxical and at worst inconceivable ...”

“... If the balaclava’d guerrilleros of the Animal Liberation Front run short of targets once they’ve seen off the laboratories full of victimised mice, they might consider picketing the rare but potentially newsworthy venues in which academic psychologists on the professional ascent try to make up their minds whether animals, too, have minds that can be made up ...”

“... It’s a strange thing when, in the course of a murder trial at the Old Bailey, a cracked plastic bath is carried into the courtroom, and a second strange thing when no one at the time thinks to ask why on earth it was needed there. The bath had been unplumbed from a house in Cambridgeshire, driven to London and, like a fair few of the arrested before it, been roughed up when in police custody, bearing two cracks once it was on display in the courtroom where before it had only one ...”

“... Notes towards a Devotio ModernaIAs if there was a sky where we couldpause a while, like medievalpilgrims, we are patient to the lastand have no thought of After, or the godsthat might have been: the green amidst the black,the changelings, or the newly resurrected.Unlike the saints, we have no usefor angels, all thatbright dust floating downfrom worlds we have no reason to pursue;though sometimes, in the house we learned by heartas children, everaftered in a fogof Sabbath and the scent of mother love,we let some devil in to make its bed:wind in the ashes, chemtrails in the cinders ...”