“... the other hand? On the same hand, surely, since the words which follow are the words we have just read. No, on the other hand, because the writer is different, and the meaning of the words is also different. How could Menard, a 20th-century writer using a foreign language, setting his novel in the 16th century, not write differently from the native speaker ...”

“... a supposed British agent in Hungary was played backwards, sounding, according to Bardens, like ‘Donald Duck squeaks’. Meanwhile, a less promising segment on a British millionaire who imported fish from Iceland was scuppered by the last-minute absence of a studio interview; a large dead cod on ice, drying under the TV lights, had to stand in as the main ...”

“... confluence of Quinean and Wittgensteinian lines of thought – found, for example, in the work of Donald Davidson – created a philosophical climate in which the very idea of ‘necessary truth’ was viewed with scepticism. But the climate suddenly changed, thanks to Kripke. Celebrating the entrance of his hero on the philosophical scene, Soames for once ...”

“... the master of policy but the slave of unforeseeable and uncontrollable events.’ That sounds like Donald Rumsfeld’s rather pithier ‘stuff happens,’ though in Rumsfeld’s case the realisation came too late. Churchill was good at the longue durée. Sometimes. That was his problem. He made a whole lot of predictions, but more of them were wrong than ...”

“... statement, made by a woman who was raped, while unconscious, by a college athlete in Stanford, was read online eight million times. In September, the judge who sentenced the perpetrator to just six months in jail was asked to stand down from his job as a girls’ tennis coach. In a statement, the judge said he did so to ‘protect the players from the ...”

“... is astoundingly gullible with regard to the so-called Monks of Medmenham: he depends wholly on Donald McCormick’s valueless book on the Hell Fire Club, and does not seem aware that Betty Kemp has called into question the entire existence of the group as such. To set these things aside is not to do very much, because the great majority of the book deals ...”

“... currently teaching in Atlanta.) His first book, The Political Economy of Slavery (1965), could be read as an attack on Southern 19th-century ‘progress’, about which regional historians had long boasted. Genovese argued instead that a pre-capitalist order under slaveholder control prevented the rise of a powerful middle class, hobbled industrial growth and ...”

“... bluebells? There are further guest appearances by Proust, Freud, Virginia Woolf, Ramsay Mac Donald, Winston Churchill and other ‘stars’, and it is not every pair of Cockney youngsters who travel to France, as Amos and Zak do, in a laundry-basket full of General Haig’s underpants. All this is good fun, but the dialogue is sometimes inexcusably ...”

“... that you can’t take your eyes off him; everything he does is full of sleaze and interest. Donald Sutherland, by contrast, as the top military man who, off the record, confirms all of Garrison’s darkest and most far-reaching suspicions, merely oozes complacency: it is so satisfying to think your President has been murdered in a plot involving all the ...”

“... a more permanent exhibit: two earthenware jars. The jars are old and empty now, but you can still read their labels. ‘Sennae P.V.’ one says, ‘Pimento’ the other. Senna is made from the plant Cassia acutifolia which, when swallowed, accelerates the squeezing action of your gut (peristalsis). Your intestine will do all it can to get rid of the stuff ...”

“... him as a man by telling the story of his brief life in the outlaw’s own voice. And to read the story is to see why he isn’t surprised that it should end in hanging: ‘I were but 14 1/2 yr. old … but … I were already travelling full tilt towards the man I would become.’ Kelly was born c.1855, the oldest son of Irish Catholics, his mother a ...”

“... alloy with a sphere gleaming at its zenith – Rolling Moon. In black felt-tip near its base I read: ‘I will always love my beloved boyfriend Alan Cousins for eva 12.5.91.’ Is this vandalism? According to the recently retired maestro of Grizedale, the forester Bill Grant, only one thing has ever been destroyed there: the crows, which were trashed by a ...”

“... Painting’, which he wrote twenty years later, as the 20th century’s most widely read piece of art criticism. Partisan Review published ‘Towards a Newer Laocoön’ a few months after ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’. Greenberg set out his stall in these two essays: the best art of modern times – roughly, after 1850 – had no interest in ...”

“... when it proved difficult not to join in his merriment. When he officiated at burials, he would read out psalms by the graveside in such a droll manner that some mourners had to stifle their laughter. Bell-ringing was another of his obsessions. He would set off in heavy rain to walk a mile from his house to ring the bells at a church when someone died. As ...”

“... where – at least in theory – any Korean can come and attend classes, use a computer or read a book. At the entrance, the revolving door had jammed and the rusted metal entranceway was being spray-painted silver, like the set of a school play. The fumes were very strong. Inside, I was taken into some English classes. In one, a group of ...”