“... Inquisition prohibited it in 1620 and actively prosecuted its use. ‘Hast thou eaten the flesh of man? Hast thou eaten the peyotl? Do you suck the blood of others?’ a 17th-century catechism read. But its use survived where the cactus grew in northern Mexico and where semi-nomadic groups evaded conquest. In 1890, the Norwegian ethnographer Carl Lumholtz ...”

“... Mussolini had a Jewish minister of finance in 1933. ‘Our Mediterranean culture,’ claimed the man from CasaPound, ‘was always a melting pot of diverse cultures.’ But for Pound, the Mediterranean was not so inclusive. Its culture was ‘untouched by the two maladies, the Hebrew disease, the Hindu disease’. Only between these diseases was there ...”

“... twice a week, but those letters remain unpublished; they might convey another aspect of Larkin the man, but from those quoted, a less interesting one.) And now James Booth, who teaches English at Hull, and has already written two books on the poet (Philip Larkin: Writer, 1992, and Philip Larkin: The Poet’s Plight, 2005), has composed a brief for the defence ...”

“... the same time they designated human institutions as a metaphor of that emptiness and the work of man as the continuity of the desert, culture as a mirage and as the perpetuity of the simulacrum.’ Or, later, ‘the whole of America is a desert. Culture exists there in a wild state; it sacrifices all intellect, all aesthetics in a process of literal ...”

“... those paintings but me.’ The Irwin of the late Seventies whom Weschler describes is a contented man. Yet at that point his work seemed to have come to a dead end. He had run the line of the argument he was following until there was literally nothing to be done – no work to make. He was very happy, he said, to do nothing. It was partly a Californian ...”

“... as the duodenum, the bit of the small intestine just downstream of the stomach. By the 1910s, X-ray technology was making a vital contribution to visualising the stomach and its lesions. Surgical access to the organs of the abdomen in the 19th century was slow in developing, partly because of problems with anaesthesia and infection, and partly because ...”

“... Darn again! Practice makes perfect. Most fiction about tampering with history (since at least Ray Bradbury’s story ‘A Sound of Thunder’, published in 1952) places a lot of emphasis on unintended consequences. Chaos theory as popular culture imagines it, in The Butterfly Effect or the Back to the Future films, is more concerned with spiralling ...”

“... such as a picture, on page 152, of a tea party Harry gave in London in the late 1970s with X-Ray Spex’s Poly Styrene, the Selecter’s Pauline Black, Chrissie Hynde from the Pretenders, Albertine and Siouxsie Sioux. I was at school in Scotland doing my O-Grades back in those days, when Top of the Pops started filling up with these oddly dressed and ...”

“... are insane. Whatever is touched is spoiled. There is some woeful mental infirmity in the man – he was months buried in correcting the press of the last volume, and in that time began spoiling the new poems (in proof) as hard as he could. ‘Locksley Hall’ is shorn of two or three couplets. I will copy out from the book of somebody who luckily ...”

“... offered like a boastful list of ‘previous’, is fulsome but inaccurate. Jack Spot: Man of a Thousand Cuts was not published by the Olympia Press but by Alexander Moring. The ghost’s nom de guerre is Hank Janson, not ‘Jansen’. The index is also dodgy (as I discovered by trying to check on George Walker: no trace on page 80 or page ...”

“... of sniffing commentators: can no one remember how it is for the young woman confronting the older man, so seductively marked by experience, so essentially powerful, always knowing you better than you know yourself? The entire affair would, I imagine, have reminded them of their relations with Olga Kosakiewicz, who began as Beauvoir’s pupil and went on as ...”

“... know as much about alienation as you, a short American Jew.’ (‘So you see the problem,’ the man replies.) That’s as much as we hear about Turko-New Jerseyan alienation, in a discussion which is framed as a debate over the extent to which literature can ‘render comprehensible different kinds of unhappiness’. In ‘Summer in Samarkand’, her ...”

“... near extinct cowboy (Disney’s recent animation The Good Dinosaur casts them in this role; the Ray Harryhausen-animated creature feature The Valley of Gwangi also contains a mash-up of dinosaur and Western themes). The artist who breathed life into the vast numbers of dinosaur fossils collected on the outlaw frontier was Charles Knight. Born in New York in ...”

“... on ships. This chapter supersedes all other discussions of the subject in English, and Ray Page, on letters runic and poetic, offers a remarkable example of how an expert can demonstrate the general interest of a very technical topic without sacrifice of scholarly integrity. The Northern World hardly succeeds in its professed purpose, ‘to examine ...”

“... restating: if Proust’s life had been in some respects mad, his novel was madder; if Proust the man had been both a snob and an egalitarian, his novel pressed this contradiction to a point of sublimity.’ A la recherche is not a thinly disguised autobiography, as the ‘convincing and accessible near-novels by biographers like André Maurois and George ...”