“... It is a bit brown and the scribal hand is functional, unremarkable, almost ugly. For Simon Armitage the scribe’s letter forms are ‘like crusading chess pieces’, which is a disservice to chessmen. Sometime after it was written, it was illustrated by an artist endowed with exuberance rather than skill. The figures which appear in the spaces ...”

“... by 1943. If his books now end up in charity shops alongside discarded copies of the F-Plan Diet or John Seymour’s Complete Book of Self-Sufficiency, it’s because the shimmering and peaceable ‘England’ he promised is not, after all, to be found waiting at the end of a deserted lane, or, if it were, we’d never know, because we’d be stuck in a traffic ...”

“... on a hideous yacht. The romance went out of New Romanticism the minute the band’s bass player, John Taylor, in the video for the single ‘Rio’, crawled up the beach with a rifle to help a lady who was being splashed with champagne, followed quickly by their singer, Simon Le Bon, diving into the blue Antiguan waters ...”

“... does little to resolve. The Golden Age, the Land of Cokaygne, Joachimism, the Revelation of St John, the free-market economy, socialism and Marxism, democracy, America and the Soviet Union: these and more are all dragged into a history of what he calls ‘visions of ideal otherness’ which begins with Hesiod and ends sometime about now. Its great merit ...”

“... of capitalism and class struggle. Marx now had a folder to himself, as did Fourier and Saint-Simon. There were new dossiers on the Stock Exchange, the Working-Class Movement, Professional Revolutionaries, the Commune, the materialist anthropology (and zoology) of the first Socialist Sects. The web was more and more complex – some would say tangled. It ...”

“... everything short of pre-paid order forms. The illuminati have been smuggled into the Index: John Wilkinson, Peter Riley, Drew Milne, Rod Mengham and (of course) J.H. Prynne himself. Prynne and Zappa? Certainly, why not? Ben Watson (the footnotes): ‘When I asked Jeremy Prynne what he thought of Captain Beefheart, he said he thought he sounded like ...”

“... a range of examples from the writings of Patrick Kavanagh, Brian Friel, Tim Pat Coogan, Oliver St John Gogarty, Neil Jordan and Hugh Leonard. It’s a method that seems to be at once academically sound and, for those committed to a long weekend in England and Wales carrying only one bag and one book, perfect for a bit of one-way crack, or ‘entertaining ...”

“... connections that can entail. He has Westminster experience as a parliamentary researcher, but to John McDonnell; his parents were Militant activists and his politics are rooted in a Trotskyist version of Labourism, yet he has managed to force a neoliberal Labour establishment to take him seriously. His opinions would be ridiculed as those of a ...”

“... O’Hanlon’s entreaties. In the end he is forced to make do with a photographer friend called Simon Stockton, whose only claim to literary eminence is to have been in the same class at school as Martin Amis. But here O’Hanlon sees his angle. Stockton runs a seedy casino in Kensington, and as a photographer specialises in the nude pin-up. His darkroom ...”

“... has been credited in earlier pages. One would have liked to hear the opinion of her husband, Luc Simon, on this matter. He was an ‘ordinary mug’, maybe, but one whom she apparently loved and who had no intolerable chips that we are told of. Yet she threw him away after she discovered that Picasso had tricked her and secretly married her rival. As for the ...”

“... for instance, Burns Singer, one of the most original poets of the Fifties, or David Wright and John Heath-Stubbs. All three were friends of Graham, and their inclusion might have helped the Forties and Fifties out of their New Apocalypse v. Movement stand-off. Hamish Henderson, whose 1948 Elegies for the Dead in Cyrenaica (reprinted by Polygon in ...”

“... one merits Norman Davies’s unqualified approval. It is an arresting retrieval from oblivion. John Lingard’s eight-volume History of England (1819) has been thinly, if ever, read during the last hundred years. But, written by a Catholic priest, it escaped the grip of both nationalism and Protestantism. It gave, uniquely, something like a global ...”

“... of Artificial Intelligence, in which Hofstadter takes a line which tackles both the objections of John Searle to the very proposition of machine-based intelligence and the claims of Herbert Simon that such an intelligence is already emerging. But there are many other topics, which take him well beyond the terrain of the ...”

“... as a representative extract for much longer and more elaborate babblings, such as the full text of John Berryman’s ‘Step One’, prelude to the general confession he made for Alcoholics Anonymous, wherein the sufferer relates all the harm he has done himself and others. If the day ever comes when I pin that document above my typewriter, it will be because ...”