“... In 1883, a Mr Wendell Phillips Garrison of New York published a travel narrative called What Mr Darwin Saw on his Voyage around the World, a narrative that follows pretty closely Darwin’s own line and Darwin’s own words, or at least the less intellectually taxing of Darwin’s own words. In a remarkable preface Garrison suggests that the text contains all a child needs at every stage of its education: a well-conducted parent could match the level of difficulty with the child’s evolving ability, telling the story in simple numbers for the babe in arms or on the knee, in greater detail for the toddler and schoolchild, until the grown student gets the undiluted works ...”

“... flipside, ‘Blue Moon of Kentucky’. Helped along by the wired know-how of the studio owner Sam Phillips, Elvis and two rockabilly cats he’d only just met made a devilishly catchy new sound out of country dash and bluesy holler and after-hours leer. The name of the studio was Sun: flash, heat, escaping light. Ra worship in this other Memphis. Teenage ...”

“... to Vaughan when he used them in the 17th century. But they have yet to lose their meaning. Adam Phillips writes: Soon after I’d qualified as a child psychotherapist someone – I think Christopher Bollas – suggested that I should write to Frank Kermode about writing a Fontana Modern Master on Winnicott. This seemed to me an extraordinary idea. I had ...”

“... recommended. From Paris, it was on to New York. Meeting Partisan Review’s co-editor William Phillips at a party, Sontag, now a single mother living on a shoestring, got right to business: ‘How do you write a review for Partisan Review?’ ‘You ask,’ Phillips replied. ‘I’m asking,’ she said, and, open ...”

“... Modern movie actors are much like ourselves, only better-looking, with faster cars; people like Tom Hanks or Helen Hunt derive the major part of their appeal from what we might call their apparent ordinariness, and only occasionally, as with Jim Carrey or Robin Williams, does an actor come along who seems to have the superhuman plasticity of a ...”

“... born (in 1761) in humble circumstances, but with strong theatrical connections. Her parents, Grace Phillips and Francis Bland, were unmarried and her mother was herself an actress. When Dora was 13, her father disappeared, and not long after, she made her first appearance on the stage in Dublin. She was soon taken up by Richard Daly, an unscrupulous ...”

“... well as Uncle Vester: Elvis never said no to anything. In one Caesar’s Palace show he could be Tom Jones for the moony middle-aged women, Kenny Rogers for their gruff-hiding-maudlin husbands, Sinatra for the oldsters, while still summoning up enough of the ‘Hound Dog’ days for those who thought themselves for ever young. He may have been banned back in ...”

“... of a dinner party than a modern archive. Friends, including the young Welby Pugin and old Colonel Phillips, who had been round the world with Captain Cook, were welcome to keep Smith company while he dried out mouldy Rembrandts in front of the fire. Bores, among whom he numbered Haydon, were told there was no room. In the galleries of the museum where ...”

“... for almost a century of the Boy’s Own Paper). McAleer also uses the records of Tom Harrisson’s Mass-Observation project, which monitored (among much else) Londoners’ reading habits over the period 1937-46. All publishing history tends towards the condition of statistic and anecdote. McAleer’s book is rich in both departments. The text ...”

“... champion of free speech and Jeffersonian populism, and repeatedly cited Jefferson, along with Tom Paine, Thoreau and Emerson, as indigenous sources of American anarchism. Yet she voiced her disdain for the people in terms that would shock any populist. She denounced English workers, for example, for supporting the Boer War, including ...”

“... spicy is the stuff little girls are made of. If kissing can be ‘aim-inhibited eating’, as Adam Phillips has suggested in his essay ‘Plotting for Kisses’, then Carroll’s tea parties and jam tarts, his jaws that bite, babies that turn into pigs and get their faces peppered, his old men devouring little oysters, can be seen as moves in his unconscious ...”

“... days was Stockhausen’s headquarters at Darmstadt, where the ‘Darmstadt Headbangers’, as Tom Lubbock describes them, treated Britten and Shostakovich with derision as traditionalists, and serialism reigned supreme. In 1957 Cardew won a scholarship to study at the electronic studio of Westdeutscher Rundfunk, then considered the most advanced outpost ...”

“... Gingrich’s triumph in 1994. Some of the religious right’s most loyal allies were vanquished. Tom DeLay, the former bug exterminator from Texas who had been a steadfast friend to evangelicals during his time as House majority leader, was dethroned in a corruption scandal before the election. The voters of Pennsylvania rejected Rick Santorum, perhaps the ...”

“... the law of institutions. Like Tesco the police must grow. 22 October. Mention in a piece by Caryl Phillips in today’s Guardian of a school in Leeds against which his school used to play football. ‘When I was a boy, we used to play football against a secondary school with the somewhat hopeful name of Leeds Modern. The joke, of course, was there was ...”

“... time a considerable debt to the writers of spy stories – in particular to William Le Queux and Phillips Oppenheim. Le Queux’s hero, Duckworth Drew, whose name rhymed with his own and whose appearance matched his own self-image – ‘unobtrusive, of perfect manner, and a born gentleman’ – is first found outwitting the French Foreign Minister by ...”