“... goddess never left the plucky Eisenhower country mapped by these ‘artworks’. Everyone from John Baldessari to the Rev. Howard Finster recombines tulle and Disney, winged sunglasses and King Kongs with the truly scary hairy monster which has been bought 800 million times. The introduction is helpful about that figure: ‘imagine the population of India ...”

“... lover, he undid the 16 tiny buttons of her pretty dress and in Judy’s room on Judy’s bed he took her at once without a word. Afterward, having established tenancy, he rewarded her with kisses. But he dressed quickly because he was obligated by the stories of his life to remind her of transience. It is the ex-wife Anna who thinks ...”

“... that if he was afraid he might go ashore. He then wrote a farewell letter to his wife and took the Blenheim out into the Indian Ocean, where all aboard went down in a cyclone, including Admiral Troubridge. To relieve the roll-call of mass drownings we are given frequent items which shed peculiar light on the seafaring life; as, for instance, the ...”

“... themselves the beneficiaries of the electoral realignment Timothy anticipated. In the event, it took two general elections and parliamentary stalemate over Brexit for Labour’s ‘red wall’ to crumble, and by then Timothy – like Hill and, eventually, May – had long since paid the price for perceived failure. His fall was cushioned by well-remunerated ...”

“... her ‘reckless rustle over depths and difficulties’, which was very like a man to think.)When John Blackwood, who was publishing Miss Marjoribanks in serial in his magazine, taxed Oliphant with making Lucilla too ‘hard’, she responded: ‘I have a weakness for Lucilla, and to bring a sudden change upon her character and break her down into tenderness ...”

“... was at the end of Leahy Road in Sandymount. It is where, reputedly, on 16 June 1904, James Joyce took Nora Barnacle on their first date, when she slid her hand down inside his trousers to move his shirt ‘softly aside’. With hindsight, Joyce saw something in that moment (eyes closed, eyes open): a kind of crux in his life, the fact that his future had ...”

“... a dividing line between the fiscal responsibility of our party and the reckless promises of John McDonnell and Jeremy Corbyn?’ Four years ago in these pages I warned that the government’s plans to bring down the headline debt figure through asset sales, including the sale of part of the student loan book, would mean a loss of millions of pounds to ...”

“... throughout the second century AD, authors such as Achilles Tatius, Dictys of Crete, and Lollianus took up Phoenicia as the subject and the setting of their fictional works. Heliodorus famously plays with the word phoinix throughout his novel, using it in every possible sense: merchants from Tyre, the dark red colour of murex dye or blood, dates and palm ...”

“... material of her art. She published nothing until she was in her thirties and even then, though she took immense trouble over her ‘little books’, she was modestly dismissive of them. The year before her death in 1943, when she was world-famous, she wrote to a friend that really she had done nothing: ‘I have just made stories to please myself because I ...”

“... the tale of James James Morrison Morrison Weatherby George Dupree, who took great care of his mother, though he was only three. The mother, you will remember, disobeys James James’s order that she should not go down to the end of the town without consulting him. She never comes back. It is shrugged off very casually: King ...”

“... the world.’Erica is a twin whose sister played the piano fast and moved slowly: ‘The slowness took her away, drew her in like an abyss.’ Is Carrère’s slow book attempting a similar trick? He is learning to type on typing.com. His editor, who always wanted to read him ‘immediately’, has died. A writer who in the past always placed himself at the ...”

“... of his ‘philosophical heroes’ as Dewey, James (W.; certainly not H.), Peirce, J.L. Austin, John McDowell, Husserl (with reservations) and, of course, Wittgenstein. Disappointingly, however, neither Putnam nor anybody else in his direct realist pantheon is prepared actually to offer an account of how perception works. Rather, ‘in my opinion, “direct ...”

“... as to throw away invoices; he assembled all the papers, went to court in a libel action and took on the eminent Sergeant Shee, to such effect that the judge stopped the trial, awarding him costs and a retraction of the libel. Jones emerged with his character intact, but with his newspaper career near its end. Late in 1859 he went bankrupt, with debts of ...”

“... Purrrfect!’ That was last summer, and new brutalism in academia was taking on another meaning. I took my Californian friend inside, to get a feel of the hessian-clad walls; the cloth is a little frayed by now, but the décor still gave off aromas of patchouli, Nesquik, joss sticks, Players No. 6, beanbags, and this and that kind of grass. The University of ...”

“... West German economic miracle. The occupation is often remembered as the moment when young Germans took to jazz and, like Sollors, aped the casual manner of the American soldiers posted in their country, but it was primarily a time of hunger and misery, as the Germans burrowed into ruins, or joined crowds of ragged DPs trekking across the country. ‘We ...”