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“... of a bedside table defaced by cigarette burns. This fantasy has some bearing on the task facing David Sylvester in writing this marvellous book. He has discovered a room behind the wardrobe. In 1912, Magritte, 13 at the time, lost his mother who, after several unsuccessful attempts at suicide, managed to drown herself. According to Magritte’s ...”

“... are upturned – The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales by Jon Scieszka and Lane Smith (1993) is a good example – than it does with fairy tales themselves. The narrative – which teems with talking animals – constantly plays with fairy-tale convention. Cinderella’s carriage pulled by mice-horses is reconfigured as the Blue Fairy’s ...”

“... as Grover Norquist, the anti-tax ideologue; Bush Bimbaugh as Rush Limbaugh, the radio ranter; David Roader as David Broder, the soporific Washington Post columnist.) At their first meeting, the Meliorists draw up an agenda which they elaborate over the next several months. It includes the financing of a ...”

“... in Northern Ireland did attract a fair bit of attention. A former moderator of the Free Church, David Robertson, wanted to see him in a church court because he had failed to let his faith influence his politics. ‘He is part of our Christian family,’ his local church in Skye announced, ‘and as in all families we will discuss things lovingly and ...”

“... as a species of indigenous Europeans that was, in the words of the anthropologist Fred Smith, ‘demographically and genetically swamped by the African biological race of homo sapiens’ – an argument that fuels right-wing fears about migration and ‘white replacement’. The familiar lesson that Geroulanos draws from this and countless other ...”

“... recorded by the French-Mauritian chronicler Nicolas Mayeur in 1806 and reproduced in the late David Graeber’s Pirate Enlightenment, called for gun flints, lead balls, gunpowder and river water to be mixed in an upturned shield with the point of a knife, the draught then taken with ginger soaked in the blood of the oath-takers. Mayeur, a retired slave ...”

“... Just as some faces are a gift to the photographer (Artaud, Patti Smith), so certain lives are a gift to the biographer. These are, broadly, of two types: the hard and gemlike, abbreviated, compressed, intense; and the lengthy, implausible, exfoliated, whiskery, picaresque. Vehement or even violent emotion is good, overt drama, prominent contacts or associations, sudden changes of orientation, movement through different societies and settings ...”

“... go before the Supreme Court) the death from heatstroke in an Iraq military camp of Private Jason Smith in August 2003 was held – rightly – to be a matter for investigation by the assistant deputy coroner for Oxfordshire, into whose territory the body had been returned. Smith had had to endure shade temperatures in ...”

“... David Lurie, the soured academic who is the protagonist of J.M. Coetzee’s novel Disgrace, earns his living as a professor of ‘communications’ in a Cape Town university (his former department, Classics and Modern Languages, has been rationalised out of existence). He is obliged to spend most of his time teaching this new subject, in which he has no interest, no belief even, but is allowed to offer one special course per year ‘irrespective of enrolment ...”

“... a radical departure from the way we have traditionally viewed our reciprocal relationships. David Marquand, in what is properly the opening essay of the book, argues that hitherto the Left has been possessed by the same ‘reductionist individualism’ as the Right. The result was a ‘paradox’: social democracy could exist only within communitarian ...”

“... were either soured by authorial complaints against Olwyn Hughes, Ted Hughes and the Estate (e.g. David Holbrook, Edward Butscher) or have come to nothing (e.g. Lois Ames, Harriet Rosenstein). Most of the book-length literary criticism is unimpressive. There isn’t much to choose, for example, between Margaret Dickie Uroff (‘As they developed, Plath came ...”

“... did Mr Murdoch a huge service when it published the full text of Lord McGregor’s letter to Sir David Calcutt. In that remarkable document the Chairman of the Press Complaints Commission exposed the degree to which the Princess of Wales actively stoked up press interest in the state of her marriage. What is more, it turned out that the facts contained in ...”

“... were opinion formers like Joseph Addison, who airbrushed out Milton’s regicidal politics, or David Garrick, who turned Shakespeare from upstart crow into national bard; there were theoreticians of ‘original composition’ like Edward Young, who set a premium on the rejection of classical models; there were book-trade entrepreneurs whose huge poetry ...”

“... among them Eugenides’s contemporary Jonathan Franzen and a younger cohort that includes Zadie Smith and Dave Eggers – have come to believe that too much was lost – in moral and emotional engagement, in readership – when realism was thrown over. As Franzen wrote in the New Yorker, ‘in college, I’d admired Derrida and the Marxist and feminist ...”

“... it ceased to be satire. In fact, it was a sort of apotheosis. Gilbert’s caricatures made W.H. Smith, Sir Garnet Wolseley and Oscar Wilde popular celebrities. Wolseley was so tickled by being portrayed as Major-General Stanley in The Pirates of Penzance that he learned the show-stopping ‘Modern Major-General’ patter-song and performed it at ...”