“... Naughtie, Nigel Slater and David Hare, who claims that the best conjunction he’s seen so far is George Steiner talking to Joan Collins.Come away at eight o’clock with HMQ still at it, and the policemen in the forecourt very jolly and eating ice cream.1 June. John Horder dies at 92, who, after a succession of bad doctors at university and in New York, was ...”

“... of those early years at Hyde Park Gate, Virginia had been sexually abused by her half-brother, George, while her father had lain dying of cancer ‘three or four storeys lower down’. You can read Woolf’s life as her attempt to move out of those early deaths (literally from Kensington to Bloomsbury), and then transmute them into art. The implication, as ...”

“... established a unique status as a source on how Britain is actually governed, a century after Walter Bagehot’s classic celebration of the British constitution. The Backbench Diaries might well have borrowed a title from another famous diarist and been called My Apprenticeship. We see here the origins of Crossman’s subsequent enterprise. ‘I do happen ...”

“... at which the court begins a sustained period of reconstruction. A series of openings will force George Bush, the Senate and the American people to confront a new set of choices. When the last vacancies arose during the 1980s and early 1990s, liberalism was still a dynamic force on the court. But the last liberal justices retired more than a decade ...”

“... the Hitler-Stalin Pact in the following historical sense. He knows that the Soviet defector Walter Krivitsky had warned Washington of growing Moscow-Berlin rapprochement (though he does not connect this to the Munich sellout) and he runs the whole development together by saying: ‘Time ran out. When Hitler and Stalin made the pact to which Krivitsky ...”

“... Prynne’. Virtue is achieved by the act of naming the virtuous. Beautiful slicks of Adorno and Walter Benjamin that don’t quite fit together (like the M25). You start to feel, convince yourself, that you’ve actually read these books. Passive absorption (Clinton style): the compulsory hallucination of living through those counterculture ...”

“... again’, and the ‘autographic sequel’, which is not an imitation but a prolongation – like Walter Scott’s or James Fenimore Cooper’s novel cycles, or Balzac’s Human Comedy. Both types are tied to market forces. Collections like To Be Continued: An Annotated Guide to Sequels (1995) and The Whole Story: 3000 Years of Sequels and Sequences ...”

“... fide complots as arms for hostages, the secret bombing of Cambodia, or the entente between IT&T, George Bush’s CIA and the Chilean military, which sprang that latter-day Demosthenes Augusto Pinochet Ugarte into office. As LaRouche rightly notes, Marcuse had done the state some service, and he knew it. In the circumstances it is hardly surprising that his ...”

“... of life and death; and when they defer to or expatiate upon European theorists of translation like Walter Benjamin or George Steiner, it is easy to miss, as I think Christopher Reid did, the altogether un-European urgency of their concern. For them, translation, and the disputable possibility of it (at least as regards ...”

“... sense of human futility and his dream-like obsession with punishment, noting that practical George Dance used the drawings when designing Newgate and that De Quincey, recalling Coleridge’s commentary on them, got the facts wrong but captured the spirit of the drawings, believing them to represent Piranesi’s dreams. ‘Thus the dreams of men engender ...”

“... immediacy become not only pleasurable pursuits but ethical ones (as they were for Walter Pater): alertness in life, to works of art, to weather, or to one’s friends, has its formal equivalent in the shifts of attention and enjambment that are found throughout the work: Yes, it’s necessary, I’ll do what you say, put everything aside but ...”

“... it is the Congressional Record (unless it is not) we know that John Gey, or Grey, is in fact Dr George O. Gey, though his wife Margaret (though perhaps she was called Mary, who is to say?) has gone the way of all female scientific flesh. The citation ends: ‘I sincerely hope her name will also be immortalised as one of courage, hope and strength, and that ...”

“... structuralism, and not only because Roman Jakobson and Claude Lévi-Strauss worked together; Walter Benjamin’s thinking was often, perhaps always, inseparable from the turns his language took. Even the austere Adorno said that one could ‘hardly speak of aesthetic matters unaesthetically, devoid of resemblance to the subject matter’. I don’t think ...”

“... that they were merely being compensated rather than corrupted. As the anti-Union politician George Lockhart of Carnwath remarked, the Equivalent was ‘the cleanliest Way of bribing a Nation, to undo themselves; and alas! It had the design’d Effect.’ Daniel Defoe, working in Edinburgh as an English spy, noticed how easily the Equivalent ...”

“... selected prose, Harrison commemorates the ‘nicotine-stained digits of defiance’ of the actor Walter Sparrow, who as the chain-smoking ex-miner in Harrison’s film Prometheus delivers a scorching attack on the anti-smoking lobby:You just get t’first drag down your throat ’nSome bugger’s barking it’s verboten …There’s not one joy but what some ...”