“... he was singing ‘Fame’ from the back of the limo he mentions – a ‘dream car twenty foot long’ (as he put it in the song that ‘Fame’ could be said to be twinned with, Station to Station’s ‘Golden Years’). Or, if not singing, repeating the words in his head as a nursery rhyme to keep his overstimulated skull from cracking open. A ...”

“... What lends an aura to Vincent is his particularity, the mole on his haunch, his severely infected foot, and his death, for at the very beginning of the book Guibert announces to us that Vincent is already dead, that he jumped to his death while stoned (there’s a suggestion that Vincent knew he had Aids). In this book Guibert has exchanged one Proustian ...”

“... it to Pennsylvania, which was probably just as well. (In his shaggy-dog history of ideas, Madoc, Paul Muldoon imagines the high-minded debacle that would have ensued had they ever got there.) Fiery Southey grew cooler and cooler. He began by suggesting that the party might perhaps work up to the full American dream by way of a small farm in Wales (Coleridge ...”

“... Whether Wilson expected the union leaders, whom he knew well, to bite is not clear. Michael Foot gave the rationale for killing off the idea when he rose in the Commons to say that the Left was not against an incomes policy – ‘indeed, we believe such a policy is essential to socialism’ – but that in this case the Government had ‘associated ...”

“... out of the fire. The Happy Guys was loosely based on Universal’s The King of Jazz, starring Paul Whiteman (Starr’s view) and/or on Paramount’s Love Me Tonight (Hoberman’s view), both of which were released during Alexandrov’s time in America. It tells the story of a simple shepherd from the shores of the Black Sea who overcomes all obstacles and ...”

“... fit of imperial caprice. It was Leopold’s personal property, not Belgium’s. He never once set foot in it. He celebrated its establishment in 1885 at the Conference of Berlin by sitting on his throne while a group of Congolese children sang and danced for him. The voices of Leopold’s ‘children’ have been inaudible in even the most scathing histories ...”

“... taxation work? Or maybe class war? But without the Communist Party – of which Todd, grandson of Paul Nizan, was briefly a member in the 1960s – it’s not clear who would lead a struggle of this kind. Unless of course … And here it comes as no surprise to discover that the big incubations of the Front National, under Marine Le Pen’s father, took place ...”

“... them like squeezed-out grapefruit skins. In the course of 24 hours, I might be Nick Adams, Paul Morel, and sitting in one of the dives on 52nd Street, uncertain and afraid, as the clever hopes expired of a low dishonest decade; but these were less acts of serious reading than experiments in identity, made by somebody who very much feared that he lacked ...”

“... to keep Africans at home,’ Finkielkraut wrote, ‘rich countries are shooting themselves in the foot.’ But the fact that development aid has at times increased levels of migration has been known since the 1970s. The relevant question, as Benoît Bréville shot back in Le Monde diplomatique, is not whether development aid is reaching a country that many ...”

“... moments, those in which ‘a hand lighting a cigarette is the explanation of everything; a foot stepping from the train is the rock of all existence.’ From the start, the Auden effect was an odd blend of the diagnostic and the atmospheric, with the latter somehow complicating the former. Sometimes it’s a mock-heroic toying (‘O Who is trying to ...”

“... to (or at) an unidentified invisible presence in the back of the van. ‘Once you get your foot in the door,’ he swaggers, ‘you’ve got to keep it there.’ This exposition of method soon acquires a nastier tone. In Brixton, Barny informs us, 60 per cent of his calls are to Black customers. It wouldn’t be all that long before Enoch Powell was to ...”

“... bed-and-breakfast, farm tourism, go-kart tracks … Anything to weather the low points – BSE, foot-and-mouth – and survive in the narrow gap between rising input costs (fuel and fertiliser) and dwindling receipts: between 1998 and 2008 the farmers’ share of the price their food fetches at the supermarket checkout fell by 22 per cent.Scientists, policy ...”

“... pools and cinemas and state of the art gymnasia in which no uninvited civilian will ever set foot. These windowless sets, finessed by fashionable architects, are like parodies of facilities promised for the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park. And nobody but the owners can get at them. What could be more empowering than to sit looking at an immaculate rectangle ...”

“... compared with what might be expressed in words. I felt this strongly as I stood before the Paul Veronese. I felt assured that more of Man, more of awful and inconceivable intellect, went into the making of that picture than of a thousand poems.John Ruskin’s diary, 8 September 1849Over the past half-century or so, when writers have turned their ...”

“... since no intellectual journal back then was complete without a Riesman snorkel dive; a piece by Paul de Man (remember him?) which begins on the stirring note, ‘Ever since the war, American criticism has remained relatively stagnant’; and an omnibus review of four books by Northrop Frye. ‘Notes on “Camp”’ transmits on an entirely different ...”