“... which dealt with the ‘grim realities of life’. When dissident writers such as Joyce and George Moore wished to enrage their compatriots, it was to the scandalously naturalistic Ibsen and Zola that they turned. It was Laurence Sterne, born in Tipperary, who first unmasked English literary realism as an impossible enterprise. No sooner had the novel made its ...”

“... the exhibition. The exclusion of Chuck Close, accompanied by the inclusion of three large works by Jonathan Borofsky, can only inspire the traditional football crowd’s advice to the referee to get himself a dog and a white stick. As for the exclusion of all signs of Land Art, the failure to put a photograph or two of Walter de Maria’s Lightning Field into ...”

“... the house of Katherine Benchkin on Stour Street, together with his father, his brother-in-law John Moore, and his uncle Thomas Arthur. There, in the parlour, Mistress Benchkin asked him to read out her new will, which he did ‘plainely and distinktly’, and shortly afterwards signed the will in witness. The will was discovered by another Canterbury ...”

“... about his own high moral purpose. All this adds up to his being, in the phrase of Charles Moore, ‘the most pointlessly combative person in human history’. At one point someone at the Downing Street switchboard, ‘at the end of a not untypical day’, makes the mistake of asking him how he is, and Campbell replies that he feels ‘both homicidal ...”

“... than the Book of Revelation. Orwell had Eton and the military police to draw on for 1984, and Alan Moore (V for Vendetta) had Orwell. What’s interesting is that for this ‘entirely new departure’ James stayed so close to the sense that runs through all her work of the horror of human intimacy, of touch (‘a collection of bones loosely held together by a ...”

“... funny. ‘Mr Shaw is (I suspect) the only man on earth who has never written any poetry.’ George Moore ‘is in a perpetual state of temporary honesty’. Wells ‘is the only one of his many brilliant contemporaries who has not stopped growing. One can lie awake at night and hear him grow.’ As for arguing, Chesterton and Shaw quarrelled publicly for a ...”

“... and capricious’; New York, a ‘restless monster of possibility and liability’; Marianne Moore gave us ‘treasures of eccentricity and authenticity’. It’s an aural trick: if one thing sounds like another, their pairing seems right.Hardwick once admitted that she would read her work and ‘look for a line where I might insert a vivid phrase, or ...”

“... of ‘British culture’ by proposing not only the inclusion of some Americans (Pound, Marianne Moore, John Crowe Ransom, though not William Carlos Williams) but also of the greatest working-class modernist poet, Hugh MacDiarmid. He was part of Roberts’s original core of poets; Roberts was less sure about Stevens, Yeats and Hopkins. But Stevens, Yeats and ...”

“... the Bank of England independent. The timing of public announcements became an obsession too. Jo Moore, a special adviser at the Department of Transport, was only responding to the prevailing tone when she sent her notorious email on 9/11, pointing out it was ‘a very good day to get out anything we want to bury’. But then even the saintly Bill Deedes ...”

“... stepping fastidiously round the garden expecting to be fed. 16 July. A book review in the LRB by Jonathan Coe of The Wit and Wisdom of Boris Johnson edited by Harry Mount kicks off with some remarks about the so-called satire boom of the early 1960s. It recalls John Bird’s The Last Laugh, the Cambridge Footlights revue of 1959 (which I saw) and while ...”

“... that the vision is itself disseminated and dispersed. The weight of allusion is so great that Jonathan Culler remarks, in Structuralism and Since, that Dissemination is ‘Derrida’s most forbidding and difficult book’.If the reader is familiar with Derrida’s earlier work, though, there are enough cues in Dissemination to see what is going ...”

“... It was not a mistake. ‘We knew what we were hitting. It was well-planned,’ said Admiral Jonathan Howe, the American officer in charge of the UN operation. One of Howe’s legal advisers immediately questioned whether the attack had breached the Geneva Conventions. Almost certainly, it had. Unlike the Belgians and Canadians, the US has held no public ...”

“... in her bed on 8 April 2013 after suffering a massive stroke. According to her biographer Charles Moore, the bill for her stay was ‘well into six figures’. Thatcher made a ‘five-figure contribution’; the rest was covered by the then owners of the hotel, David and Frederick Barclay, identical twins who appeared on the Sunday Times Rich List later that ...”

“... Tower, all the burgeoning ‘silos of residential units’, as the architectural critic Rowan Moore calls them, create one terrible problem. They are not just streets in the sky: they are another city, another country. A Super Strip Mall of protected debt and solipsism. The developers are based in Dubai, in China and Malaysia. They employ celebrity ...”

“... porn; campaigns in favour of global warming and freedom for corporations. Monbiot also follows Jonathan Matthews of Lobbywatch in reporting curious clusters of former LM contributors now working in public science education. For example, according to Monbiot the educational charity Sense about Science – a prominent supporter of Simon Singh in his recent ...”