“... allusion and a send-up of the whole idea of culture. The funniest moment in Pulp Fiction concerns Harvey Keitel, come to clean up after John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson have made a mess of things. Well, made a mess of a person, actually, turned him into pulp and sprayed him all over the inside of a car when Travolta’s gun went off. ‘You probably hit a ...”

“... satire and romantic tragedy. It was such violations of classical decorum that so affronted Philip Sidney and caused him to rail against his contemporaries’ taste for ‘mongrel tragi-comedy’. Shakespeare liked nothing better than to tease or confound his audience’s expectations: he renders the tragic effect of Othello even more cruel by means of ...”

“... whose account of Bolingbroke’s usurpation, according to the Elizabethan writer Gabriel Harvey, was admired by Mountjoy – represents the coup as a ‘sin’. In words recalling Hayward’s assessment of its consequences, he explains that he wrote the poem ‘to show the deformities of civil dissension, and the miserable events of ...”

“... digest of changes in Western monetary policy over the last few centuries by the Economist writer Philip Coggan, and in Debt: The First 5000 Years by the anthropologist and activist David Graeber, which situates the same stretch of modern history within the vast tidal shifts, across five millennia of Eurasian history, between monetary regimes founded on ...”

“... is certainly a richer appropriation of widow status than the sentimental claiming of the word in Harvey Fierstein’s Torch Song Trilogy, where ‘widowing’ becomes an intransitive verb: ‘Widowing … feeling sorry for myself, cursing every time I passed a couple walking hand in hand, watching tear-jerkers on TV knowing they could only cheer me ...”

“... Catholics went to the university earlier; sometimes much earlier; only eccentrics like Gabriel Harvey stayed for ever. These are the norms, and Hamlet’s intellectual youth, high in nuisance value, indicates that he adhered to these norms. Even the black of his mourning garments must have helped suggestively to support the point of his youth (attention is ...”

“... city reflected in the clear water.’Staying on the floor above her was an American painter called Harvey Cohen (Edwin in Frame’s autobiography). Frame fell for his friend George Parlette (Bernard), who ‘laughed heartily and each time he laughed I felt … as if I were a vast empty palace awaiting the guests and the feast’. They had an affair and ate ...”