“... he travelled to Rome to become an angel. It was 1487. Christendom’s most important priests would be there; the cleverest theologians would debate him. The pope would watch. Pico was going to dazzle them all. He planned to begin with a poetic, densely allusive speech, which almost no one would understand; then he would make nine hundred pronouncements, each ...”

“... secretary sits at the desk. I shift in my seat and the leather upholstery makes a sound that could be mistaken for a fart. I therefore shift in my seat again, two or three times, making the same sound deliberately in order to demonstrate that I have not inadvertently farted. The secretary looks up inquiringly. She may just ...”

“... to see English Literature replaced as a core subject in our school and university curriculum by the study of Culture and of Communications. Raymond Williams was already in mid-career, an established author and a Cambridge don, when the British Left entered its intellectual Renaissance in the 1960s. The New Left is academic, metropolitan and ...”

“... that is, on descriptions of the occupants of a local unit on a specific date, usually by household. Who is resident at any moment in a household depends on traditions of family structure, on birth, marriage and death rates, on the employment prospects of the inmates, or the needs of the family occupation, and sometimes on the active pressure of ...”

“... apportioning his property and specifying arrangements for his interment. He stipulated that he be buried ‘as privately as possible, and at Twelve o’clock at Night’ in the great aisle of Dublin’s St Patrick’s Cathedral, where he had been Dean since 1714. A tablet of black marble was to be fixed to the wall ...”

“... Suicide was thought damnable in the Middle ages, and I expect there are those who will be brought to feel by the first of these books that the Middle Ages had a point. The Monument commemorates a young couple who lived together for 17 years in a solitude à deux and who then took their own lives – incompetently and lingeringly ...”

“... begging money from them obscenely, and urinating over their smart cars. My sleeve was taken by a man who dragged me into the hellish narrative of 22 years spent in jail. Shuddering with horror at the deteriorated company into which he had been released, this fellow declared his own outlaw ethic in words that for me will always ...”

“... was when I stayed to listen to the next lecture, ‘On Alleged Medical Negligence’, delivered by George Bonney, a laconic orthopaedic surgeon with long experience on the governing body of the Medical Defence Union. His tongue-in-cheek thesis was that the invention of penicillin had been a disaster for doctors, who until then had been unable to cure much ...”

“... has been manifest in a far more obvious form in both Europe and Japan. In theory, this should not be happening. After all, in the United States there was no significant Communist or neutralist party, and therefore no equivalent to the alliance/anti-alliance party alignments of Europe and Japan. Instead there was a ‘bipartisan’ consensus on the need to ...”

“... animal. Lawrence is a mystic literalist. He is always a poet and always a preacher. He should not be opened into two. In his book, Apocalypse, which was published posthumously in 1931, one of the pleasures he takes in the book of Ezekiel and the book of Revelation is the literalism of their half-pagan world of gods and flames and wheels and beasts. He is ...”

“... a family of cantors), who escaped his father’s home to become a child saloon singer. By the first decade of the 20th century, he had assimilated the oldest conventions of New World show business – the burnt-cork make-up that was the central characterisation of America’s first indigenous theatrical form, the ‘mother song’ that had given ...”

“... studies primers and coffee-table books. They provide both an intellectual commentary, written by academics, journalists and art-world figures, and a comprehensive set of colour reproductions of the works in a show, taken by specialised photographers. From a practical point of view they are freebies for the ...”

“... Seventies (which now appear positively antiquarian) as a radiant blank. Polar nothingness bordered by custard-yellow feeder roads steering over-ambitious voyagers back to the tunnel and the distant prospect of a return to civilisation. This pilgrim’s progress is a familiar one for card-carrying Cockneys, a way out, a trip into the unknown. Musician and ...”

“... terrific self-confidence, huge energy, astute focus and ferocious determination. He did the second by exploiting a singular gift for self-publicity: introduce a journalist and Edison would produce a soundbite. Some of them slid straight into the dictionaries of quotations and stayed there, and are still daisy-fresh more than a century later. ‘From his neck ...”

“... is one overarching formula, we are told, under which all intelligible locutions about freedom can be subsumed. The prevalence of this belief appears to be due in large part to the influence of a single classic article, Gerald MacCallum’s ‘Negative and Positive Freedom’ (1967). Whenever the freedom of an agent is in ...”