“... on a lot filled with flawless Christmas trees for sale, lit by strings of lights hung from red and white candy-striped poles. The camera swoops on a family of five, husband, wife and three children, arranged in perfect descending height order from left to right, husband Henry to little Bobby. The shot is framed by two trees; in the upper right corner, a group ...”

“... never leave, I began to keep a diary of what it felt like to be there in the days of its snowy white disintegration, which felt also like the disintegration of my own mind. My interest was not academic. I did not care about the Singularity, or the rise of the machines, or the afterlife of being uploaded into the cloud. I cared about the feeling that my ...”

“... the Rolling Stones who summoned Dionysus and Pan, with their none hipper retinue: Kenneth Anger, Christopher Gibbs, Gram Parsons, Jean-Luc Godard. The Beatles grew sheepdog hair and Bakunin beards, and adopted the statutory exotic guru, but they never really had anything like the Stones’ sullen, dandified grandeur. The Stones were exquisites; the Beatles ...”

“... these prodigious gatherings, the poetry looks svelte. Yet the 2015 Faber edition of the Poems by Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue itself runs to nearly two thousand densely annotated pages. This, too, is a breathtaking achievement. Very few people will read through all these thousands of pages, and their publication risks making Eliot seem more daunting than ...”

“... appeared. I plunged into an even deeper gloom when I realised that two of them are by elderly white men, both emeritus professors, and the other is by a younger white man, not an academic. These are the two demographic categories from which the vast majority of modern English translators of Greco-Roman texts ...”

“... when she asks Jane Fairfax’s opinion as to whether she should put a particular trim on her white and silver poplin. After such a lapse we hardly need to be told that she is ‘self-important, presuming, familiar, ignorant and ill-bred’. In the very last paragraph of the novel she is allowed to linger in the wings to highlight the all-round moral ...”

“... initiation ceremony in New Mexico, I noticed the woman next to me run her fingers down the smooth white laminated wall, clearly to sample its texture and identify what it was made of. She made me realise that nothing in the show can be touched, a kind of erotic prohibition that matches McQueen’s dominant note. But there was something so knowledgeable in the ...”

“... to the ‘vociferous atheists of recent decades’. He is appalled in particular by something Christopher Hitchens wrote: that Huxley ‘cleaned Wilberforce’s clock, ate his lunch, used him as a mop for the floor, and all that’. He points out (‘pace Hitchens’) that contemporary reports suggest Wilberforce wasn’t at all put out. The passage is ...”

“... When Eagleton is explaining love as a high, even the highest political issue, he sounds quite like Christopher Caudwell, a forebear whose more primitive version of Marxism he does not much admire: but there is here at least a similarity of thought as well as a comparable exaltation of tone.There are other Marxisms which do not make love of the other a primary ...”

“... has only the faintest of suggestions that we have created him or that he has answered our call. Christopher Lee, in a series of Hammer movies, was dignified and handsome, but far too natty to have come out of anyone’s unconscious. These Hammer films, incidentally, seem now to have acquired a patina of critical respectability, rather as if Sid James, with ...”

“... for we have only to recall Derrida’s elaborate readings of Kafka, Geoffrey Hartman’s of Christopher Smart, or Barbara Johnson’s of Zora Neale Hurston, to see how much analysis of text and modification of the canon have gone into deconstructive theorising. But why should Steiner, who wants to replace commentary with ‘performance answering ...”

“... lofting into the air – but I don’t see them in the poem. When Les Murray writes, ‘the white-faced heron hides in the drain with her spear,’ or when Allen Curnow writes, ‘the small wind instruments in the herons’ throats / play an incorrigible music,’ there is in each case the shock of something quite particular, and of language forced to ...”

“... movement shifted aesthetes’ attention away from great houses to country cottages, black and white farmhouses, and small manor houses like Kelmscott. The past celebrated by William Morris or C.R. Ashbee was one of homeliness, craftsmanship and simplicity. Its location was the cottage and the village green, not the great hall and the long gallery. Objects ...”

“... than the evening air/Clad in the beauty of a thousand stars’), I was reminded of Christopher Ricks saying twenty years ago, in an article about the sexual revolution of the Sixties, that he was against the whole thing on the grounds that the new free-for-all was unfair to plain women. (What about plain men? Are women pleased to get any old ...”

“... directly to the law of war being undermined. A year ago, the American Secretary of State, Warren Christopher, put his first-class legal brain to work trying to re-interpret the 1948 Genocide Convention in order to extricate the US Government from its clear duty ‘to prevent and punish the crime of genocide’ in Rwanda. The State Department directed its ...”