“... Cynthia Chase’s essay on Daniel Deronda, say, or Hillis Miller’s on Stevens’s ‘The Rock’ – and indicate its disability? Anthony Thorlby’s essay is an elaborate demonstration that Kafka’s stories are ‘structuralist’, in the sense that they present ‘structure as such’: hence their anxiety. ‘The anxiety which links so many ...”

“... North Antrim constituency, the Giant’s Causeway, misinformed the public by telling them that the rock formation was 550 million years old. Despite such stories it would be a great mistake to pigeonhole Unionists as parochial know-nothings. Revisionist historians, most prominently Ian McBride and David Livingstone, have ...”

“... the lines of Gilbert Adair’s The Death of the Author (1992). As a comic extravaganza it salutes David Lodge, whose character Morris Zapp gets a walk-on part. But for Binet, riffing knowingly on narrative theory isn’t an end in itself. As well as being a kind of allegory, and an elaborate joke, his conspiracy plot is a way of arranging non-fictional events ...”

“... part. Here is a 1957 letter about their relationship from O’Hara to Ashbery, which appears in David Lehman’s useful The Last Avant Garde (1998): I don’t see any use in either of us going through the strain of pretending we like each other as much as we once did. I don’t know why, for instance, he has singled me out for the accusation that I’ve ...”

“... outdoor gathering that broadly resembled the free festivals of the 1970s and 1980s, but with space rock and campfires swapped for cutting-edge electronic music and supercharged sound systems. The fun lasted a while longer before the final crackdown. On a May bank holiday in 1992, several traveller convoys passing through the West Country were herded over to ...”

“... A Transparent Novel (2004) touches on similar questions. It’s about another public performance, David Blaine’s 44 days living without food in a Perspex box suspended over the Thames. One girl is convinced that the box is made of glucose: ‘When he thinks nobody’s looking, can’t you see the bastard licking?’ Other onlookers call him ‘a fake, a ...”

“... the royal employ (Rowan Atkinson, in his Blackadder persona) schemes to stifle the Palace schlock-rock gig at its birth. But we – that is, we the People – know that his knavish tricks will be frustrated and that the mystic bond between Sovereign and People will be sealed through our shared devotion to the music of Ozzy Osbourne. To describe this as ...”

“... cent of available water is used for the sole benefit of Israeli cities and settlements. At Camp David in 2000, when Ehud Barak negotiated the future of the Temple Mount compound with Arafat, Clinton favoured another ‘soft’ solution, giving Palestinians full sovereignty over the mosques on the Temple Mount, while Israel would have full sovereignty under ...”

“... with Dr Johnson a growing taste for history writing that eschewed the ‘huge canvasses’ of David Hume in favour of more intimate details ‘applicable to private life’, the emerging streets and houses and the evidence of ‘customs and manners’ which were at the same time both ancient and familiar, transformed the experience of visitors. Hamilton ...”

“... be more empowering than to sit looking at an immaculate rectangle of water, a three-dimensional David Hockney which will never be disturbed by a thrashing alien presence? Neighbours lacking this obscene quantum of liquidity might well complain about the noise, the dust, the inconvenience and the damage to their foundations. It doesn’t signify. And ...”

“... died of before. Men dying in the time it takes to catch and throw off a cold: ‘One Thursday,’ David France writes in How to Survive a Plague, ‘sexy Tommy McCarthy from the classifieds department stayed out late at an Yma Sumac concert. Friday he had a fever. Sunday he was hospitalised. Wednesday he was dead.’ Later, there were tests. A virus ...”

“... later so we get off early up the M6 to Penrith and Brampton, hoping to have a look at the Written Rock, a quarry by the river at Brampton with an inscription carved by the legion that cut the stone here for nearby Hadrian’s Wall. But it’s too cold to go looking for it and it’s said to be overgrown and eroded now, but somehow to see the place that ...”

“... stay in London thirty years ago, there is an interesting exchange with the psychiatrist David Cooper. Sinclair: It seems to me that what has emerged from this Congress [the Dialectics of Liberation] is the necessity for what has been described as madness – as one of the few active means of keeping society alive ... Cooper: Yes, I think we’ve ...”

“... had rights to lose. He never denied that he had thrown something at Foucault but denied it was a rock. In his fury at seeing Foucault, he said, he had picked up the first thing to hand – a lump of mud. As soon as he had set eyes on the Intendant-elect his ‘blood had boiled’ and he hadn’t known what he was doing or saying. But yes, he added, he had ...”

“... humanism is essentially light. The peak performer goes with the flow; he doesn’t pretend to be a rock in anybody’s idea of a stream. He incorporates ‘change’ and opportunity. Jim Gray, an engineer, recognised the moment when it came. If he was to reach the peak, he would have to abandon that long-haired ex-sailor with Vietnam patches on his ...”