“... It was a hymn to the glories of free trade and the spirit of Adam Smith, almost as baroque as James Thornhill’s enormous ceiling with its allegories of Time Exposing Truth and other desirable outcomes. A fine piece of Boris bravura, if you overlooked the fact that, during the heyday he was hymning, Britain, like many rapidly industrialising ...”

“... Aguirre, Wrath of God (1972), which in its imagining of extremity is not as far from Eliot and Sir James Frazer as you might think. Eliot’s ‘The Hollow Men’ has an epigraph from Conrad (‘Mistah Kurtz – he dead’) and in the film Kurtz, not yet dead, reads from the poem. In the uncut version of the film, Peter Cowie tells us, Brando reads the whole ...”

“... of papers’ on him, of which Professor Aarsleff speaks with such evident annoyance. Professor Harold Fisch, the doyen of Vichian scholarship in English-speaking countries, whom Professor Aarsleff holds particularly responsible for inflating Vico’s transatlantic reputation, is well able to stand up for himself: but it is against myself, by my own ...”

“... works’, but nobody (well, almost nobody) wants to revive the ‘copy theory of ideas’ which James and Dewey criticised. Fifty years from now, nobody will want to listen to the Voice of Being, or to deconstruct texts, but nobody will take seriously the ways of distinguishing between science, philosophy and art which Heidegger and Derrida ...”

“... books. Hence the cut-throat games of vocabulary-flashing and cultural reference pinned down by Harold Pinter and Joe Orton as Britain’s post-war national sport. Tynan, a bookish, unathletic boy, made this kind of competition his own. A compulsive player of word-games, he spattered his early writing with challenges to duels of literacy. A flip through his ...”

“... the Tate catalogue essay which is Chapter Five here) has made a large contribution. But as Harold Rosenberg remarked tartly of Giacometti, ‘an artist who interprets his own creations rarely lacks collaborators,’ and Giacometti has had several. There is Genet’s account of the artist and his work, and of having his portrait painted. There is ...”

“... his chronic suspicion that others were plagiarising him or those around him. His loathing of Sir James Mackintosh (’the great Dung-fly’) and of William Pitt are the clearest expressions of self-contempt; his troubles with Charles Lloyd and Thomas de Quincey stem from a mutual or compound confusion of identities; and he inspired the same bitter ...”

“... sequel’, which is not an imitation but a prolongation – like Walter Scott’s or James Fenimore Cooper’s novel cycles, or Balzac’s Human Comedy. Both types are tied to market forces. Collections like To Be Continued: An Annotated Guide to Sequels (1995) and The Whole Story: 3000 Years of Sequels and Sequences (1996) attest to the ...”

“... place in southern Nigeria, in December 1905, in the village of Ahiara. The villagers had killed Dr James Stewart, an officer who had arrived in their village on a bicycle. Major Trenchard, aged 32, was the commander of the force in charge of the subsequent massacre. The historian Johnson Asiegbu interviewed people in the area in 1978, and found that some still ...”

“... seen off the rival Oxford Anthology, produced by heavyweight academics including Frank Kermode and Harold Bloom, and the deep histories of English and British culture were being re-scripted. A revised edition of the Norton Anthology commissioned a translation of Beowulf from Heaney, and David Damrosch’s Longman Anthology of British Literature advocated a ...”

“... philosophy at Harvard. At Oxford he was working through Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics with Harold Joachim, reading the Metaphysics in Greek, and at the same time struggling with Husserl, whom he found ‘terribly hard’. He offered to send Woods his notes on the Posterior Analytics, the Ethics and the De Anima. Although his ‘fatal disposition to ...”

“... of norms, regulations and pro formas – the first signs of an entry point for the privatisers (Harold Macmillan coined the phrase Right to Buy in the 1950s). Lubetkin had been thwarted in his desire to ally his ego and talent to progressive causes ever since he arrived in Britain from Paris in 1931. His early commissions were private flats for the wealthy ...”

“... clear. She shut the pits and she shut the shipyard.’ (In fact, the shipyard closed in 1975, when Harold Wilson was in power.) But he went on to say that he looked on her more kindly now. ‘She might have done it for a good reason. I’m starting to think that way in me older days and becoming a bit more of a capitalist myself.’ At the same time, he ...”

“... funny woman in Hollywood’, who made Ball look like ‘a mortician’ by comparison. Harold Arlen, who composed the music for ‘Over the Rainbow’, said that while the rest of the cast ‘come off excellently, she alone shines’. Because she elevated almost everything she was in, it can be hard to recognise how bad most of the films MGM put ...”

“... in media scapegoating. Heath called the ‘Who governs Britain?’ general election, and lost. Harold Wilson’s Labour government then pushed the unions into a policy of supposedly voluntary wage restraint with the Social Contract, while continuing to let unemployment rise and living standards fall. People were ‘once again bemused and confused by the ...”