“... to be as much as 90 per cent of the work, each epic could easily have been composed by one man, but really it was, as Vico had suggested, the work of a whole people, who had been rehearsing it for generations, with hundreds of years to get it right. The Black Stone had not come from nowhere. Homer was a mere pinnacle projecting above the surface, part ...”

“... problematic, not to say question-begging. No physician can pop a thermometer into the brain or X-ray the heart. Whatever its nature or function, pain is felt. As Rey observes, it is best conceived of not as a raw physical sensation but as an experience (feeling filtered through culture). Not least, the dubious desire among nonsense medics to distinguish ...”

“... gang in town’ machismo. Phillips evokes the great ‘punk icon’ Poly Styrene of X-Ray Spex as an exceptional forerunner, but Phillips’s vision of punk has, in essence, been replanted and redreamed in America in a dozen different varieties: hardcore, straight edge, Riot Grrrl etc. This is punk rock as shorthand for a whole ...”

“... take another number. That fantasy took me as comfortably as it was possible to be through a death-ray session. Once or twice, to see a doctor and to have blood taken, the Poet and I took our seats, and became one with the silent mass of cancer patients and their friends or family. I often tried to go past without looking, but it was impossible. I tried ...”

“... of the most charismatic American technoscientific Thought Leaders. The influential futurologist Ray Kurzweil has put himself down for freezing at the Arizona plant, and the MIT engineer Marvin Minsky, one of the great figures in artificial intelligence, is on Alcor’s scientific advisory board. Minsky likens embracing cryonic preservation to Pascal’s ...”

“... for their votes on planning and rezoning issues. Among the worst offenders was the overbearing Ray Burke, a former minister, who was eventually jailed for tax evasion, but had earlier pocketed almost £3 million when he sold his family home to the property developers Flynn and O’Flaherty. The lavish lifestyle of Charles Haughey, the former Fianna Fáil ...”

“... son, and selling newspapers and making marmalade for the WSPU. When Asquith suddenly announced a man-only suffrage bill in November of that year, reneging yet again on a commitment to women, she turned to direct action. Her subsequent hunger strikes, and refusal to accept fluids, in Armley jail in Leeds nearly killed her. After her husband bombarded the Home ...”

“... the stern and reactionary Gregory XVI. The old pope had died at the age of eighty; the new man, who adopted the name Pius IX, was 54, with a warm personality and a cheerful, winning manner. Whereas Gregory had begun his reign in 1831 with a campaign of violent repression, Pius’s first official act was to proclaim a blanket amnesty for the political ...”

“... as it dribbled between his legs, bending down, in the timeless phrase of one journalist, ‘like a man on the crapper trying to get to the telephone’. Ray Knight scored from third for the Mets, and downstairs in the Red Sox changing area Costas watched the staff unpeeling clingfilm from the lockers before the distraught ...”

“... Red Butler, who reported it as having been said by Randolph Turpin after his defeat by Sugar Ray Robinson. How my old lady came to know this is a mystery, and how Tom comes to know it, too, as I’m sure boxing isn’t his thing. 22 January. I’m reading George Steiner’s My Unwritten Books, a series of chapters, some more autobiographical than ...”

“... of the pits in Ashington, Northumberland fairly represents her distinctive voice: Ashington man was the archetypal proletarian, the arehetypal patriarch ... As in the Army and the Stock Exchange, men’s companionship did not produce social cohesion; if fostered power and privilege for men within their own class and community ... No day matched Sunday ...”

“... hadn’t liked it at all. In 1961, he was for a few weeks the most celebrated and the most reviled man in America. That year, Maris (who grew up in Fargo as Roger Maras but changed his name in 1955 to make it harder for opposing fans to come up with offensive rhyming chants) broke the most precious record in American sports, Babe Ruth’s mark of 60 home runs ...”

“... is mainly interesting as a work of inadvertent autobiography, for the portrait it suggests of a man who really does seem to believe that ‘a world without elevator music would be much grimmer than its detractors ... could ever realise,’ a portrait animated as much by anger as by enthusiasm. Lanza the supernerd, the techno-freak, the fetishist of cultural ...”

“... of Chet Baker & Crew, Pacific Records, 1956) wasn’t it ‘Existence precedes essence’? Or: ‘Man is condemned to be free’? Or (surely a contender for a TV quiz show clincher): ‘Hell is … other people!’? I fed the ‘famous dictum’ into Google and it was nowhere to be found (Weight supplies no attribution). Existentialism likewise gets a single ...”

“... overhead thunder, with great long swells coming along the gunwales, pouring in on both sides, one man bailing like mad, the rest paddling & yelling, & our sail like a map of the world in giant rips and holes, and those fish, unbelievable, their eyes glaring like orange torches – colour of the orange on traffic lights & just as bright, actually lit from the ...”