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“... earliest known writing system, the wedge-shaped characters marking out syllables produced by a cut reed pressed into moist clay (the Latin for ‘wedge’ is cuneus). The tablet dates from the seventh century BCE; it’s a fragment of the Epic of Gilgamesh, a poem that is even older, about the adventures of the historical king of Uruk, who ruled in the 27th ...”

“... air. Then there are his male mentors, friends and acquaintances: William Ellery Channing; Sampson Reed (one of whose books Emerson considered the best thing since Plato in Plato’s line); Bronson Alcott (whom Emerson admired as a great prophet, and whose work is quite unreadable today); the ‘manifestly insane’ Jones Very (who considered himself the ...”

“... told me she had read my book, The Apparitional Lesbian, and ‘agreed with me entirely’ about Henry James and The Bostonians. She made me describe at length how I’d met my then girlfriend. (‘She wrote you a letter! And you answered? Terry, I’m amazed! I get those letters all the time, but I would never answer one! Of course, Terry, I’m ...”

“... and then a gallery saw them and I just began taking windows and putting them in galleries.’Henry Geldzahler, a young curatorial assistant at the Metropolitan Museum, went to visit Warhol’s townhouse to find him working on his earliest Pop paintings:I walked into the studio, we looked at each other and we both started laughing. And I saw on the shelf ...”

“... loves ‘a young Umbra poet (among whom in later life such great names as Imamu Baraka and Ishmael Reed will be counted the most illustrious members)’. The other roommate is Cheryl, a ‘(“negro”)’. She is dating a white freedom rider who has demonstrated his commitment to the cause by getting punched in the face in Mississippi.It isn’t clear exactly ...”

“... climate effortlessly produced. But Stewart for his part never cared for the praise of his friend Henry Fonda that he was a natural actor. Carole Lombard, who had worked with Fredric March, Charles Laughton, William Powell and John Barrymore, thought him more remarkable than any of them. On screen, his name appeared as James Stewart, and he worked hard at ...”

“... in the Obama administration, which represents ‘the triumph of identity as content’, as Adolph Reed wrote last year in Harper’s. According to Reed, Obama embodies race as ‘an abstraction, a feel-good evocation severed from history and social relations’. And few on the left or centre-left want to spoil those good ...”

“... cliff paths clad ‘in my long sleek-piled fur coat (resembling ocelot and bought on an Austin Reed charge account) and my Bally slip-on snakeskin shoes decorated rather tastefully I’ve always thought, with a delicate gold chain and having the added advantage of slightly built-up heels’. He is, as who knows better than he, a blot on the landscape, an ...”

“... cut into sheets. Early European paper bears the marks of this messy process. On a letter sent to Henry III by Berengaria of Castile sometime between 1217 and 1230, the oldest piece of paper to survive in an English archive, it’s still possible to make out the undissolved textile threads. Paper took its medieval European name from the papyrus of the ...”

“... from every corner of the earth. The very best ironies live their lives inside other ironies. Henry VIII changed his relationship with the Catholic Church so as to enable himself to marry his chosen bride. (Sadly, something happened to her.) Five hundred years later, Prince Charles changes the date of his wedding to his chosen bride so as to attend the ...”

“... Monroe Doctrine. These were big loopholes – big enough that the pact could be dismissed by James Reed, the Democratic senator from Missouri at the time, as ‘nothing but an international kiss’. Nevertheless, or perhaps on this account, 63 nations had signed by 1934 – about 85 per cent of the world’s states. Both France and Britain, though fearful of ...”

“... between them in the 1550s: ‘One with a politician’s pragmatism, the other unwilling to be a reed bending before the wind.’ Stretching the evidence at his disposal, he presents Walsingham as a noble exception in an Elizabethan privy council full of men who had tailored their religion to suit the previous Catholic regime. This, Cooper writes, was ‘a ...”

“... euphemisms for ‘Communist’. They attained their apogee in the 1948 third party campaign of Henry Wallace, an operation managed by ‘very, very progressive people’. Not only the threat of Soviet rivalry but the emergence of facts about Stalin’s tyranny destroyed a mood of comity based on expediency and fiction. Another circumstance was no less ...”

“... was written in the 1950s and first published in 1964, as Hrabal’s second book in print. Michael Henry Heim’s English translation appeared in 1995, when Hrabal was 81. Old book? New book? Young book? Formal? Formless? A chore? A breeze? Somehow Hrabal makes nonsense of the categories.Zgustová quotes Hrabal reflecting on his aesthetics (she doesn’t say ...”

“... If we rely on the ecstatic response as a source of good, we are relying on a very feeble reed. The best we can say for it is that it sometimes works, and that perhaps it works best (here is my own moral decision) when it sets off creative pattern-making that need have nothing whatsoever to do with the nature, moral or otherwise, of the trigger; and I ...”