“... When​ faced by admirers, Edward Lear was inclined to portray himself as a puzzle, or a trap: ‘How pleasant to know Mr Lear!’     Who has written such volumes of stuff! Some think him ill-tempered and queer,     But a few think him pleasant enough.The first observation was originally made by somebody who did not know Mr Lear ...”

“... or thousands of computers, linked together in a network. The world’s largest ‘mine’, run by a subsidiary of the Chinese company Bitmain in the high desert of Inner Mongolia, has more than twenty thousand machines. Bitcoin mining uses a lot of electricity. Each individual machine consumes about two kilowatts, around the same as a domestic electric ...”

“... with politicians and writers of the left had begun to wear thin. The LRB, which appeared to be moving leftward (in reality, Britain had moved to the right), stayed with him, and tossed him some meaty bones, which he gnawed loudly, often controversially. In 1989 he disparaged Hugo Young’s biography of Thatcher, in a piece of rhetorical brilliance about ...”

“... that man’s destruction of the environment is the result of his domination of other men, and only by doing away with all hierarchies – man over woman, old over young, white over black, rich over poor – could humanity avert ecological and economic collapse. In The Rise of Urbanisation and the Decline of Citizenship (1987) and Urbanisation without Cities ...”

“... themes? Or did they start with a grand Euro-vision and develop the soundtrack accordingly? To be fair, Kraftwerk have always tended to tell nil when it comes to specifics (even today, their official website is an artfully crude, tight-lipped blank), so Schütte is forced to lean on previous commentators.For those of us who get Kraftwerk’s historical ...”

“... are told about a plantation overseer who acted against pilfering slaves. His rigourcaused him to be disliked, and determined one among them, more heartless, perhaps, than the rest, to undertake his destruction. On Christmas day, Mr Brown rode to … a neighbouring estate, and upon his return in the evening … he met with his untimely death.The slave to whom ...”

“... trust as the crisis escalated, Schlesinger announced he was ‘determined that the law shall be respected’ and that anyone aware of illegal CIA activities was obliged to report them. Nixon was finally forced to resign in August 1974. His successor, Gerald Ford, made Nelson Rockefeller, a reliable intelligence insider, his vice president, and asked him ...”

“... fudged on her California driver’s licence as five two. She weighed nothing. Somewhere there must be a photograph of her beaming with delight but I’ve never seen it. With age, her neck thinned. Her arms were like birds’ legs. Her face shrank tight in lines and folds, creases deepening around her mouth. She began to wear big sunglasses. But early and late ...”

“... Class, ‘Notions as to the traditional stupidity of the British ruling class are dispelled by an acquaintance with the Home Office papers.’ In fact, Thompson mused, you could write a convincing history of English radicalism as it was warped by espionage. Government spies penetrated and provoked, infiltrated and ...”

“... know who I am?Nurse: No, dear, but if you go over and ask the lady at the desk she’ll probably be able to tell you.14 January. Most of the headlines this morning quote Bush’s remark that they have given Saddam Hussein ‘a spanking’, a homely term which nicely obscures the fact, nowhere mentioned, that people were killed, spanked in fact to death. A ...”

“... Saturday evening on Radio 3, a prattle of Oxbridge voices reviewing an exhibition selected by and posthumously mounted as a tribute to Peter Fuller. The wannabe Oxbridge voice of Giles Auty, art bumbler for the Spectator, declares ‘Peter’ was led by his arguments rather than his eyes ...”

“... to know what the people live on; he quickly sights flourishing commerce, and he is fascinated by roads and communications. He notes how slowly the giant timbers are moved on the bad roads to Chatham, and tellingly illustrates the state of the roads around Lewes: ‘I saw an ancient lady, and a lady of a very good quality, I assure you, drawn to church in ...”

“... one it hurts to throw old copies away. Visiting I.F. Stone once in Washington, I was impressed by his complete bound files of the New York Review of Books, and more impressed still that he had extracted these from the editor as part-payment. Perhaps contributors to the LRB could work the same trick on Karl Miller, who for this anthology hands over to ...”

“... the novels: Aaron’s Rod did get finished, but Mr Noon did not. Its first part was long enough to be treated as a novella, and was published as such in A Modern Lover in 1934. It attracted little attention. This part has since 1968 been available in the collected volume Phoenix II, but I think it has not been much read. Without its continuation people hardly ...”

“... This will be a happy year if everyone who owns a Rabelais gives it a good read. The French have made 1984 ‘L’ Année Rabelais’, treating it as the 500th anniversary of his birth. Glasgow (which has one of the world’s best collections of Gargantua and Pantagruel) got in early, celebrating it last year. But 1983 was Luther year ...”