“... a motoring journalist who hates ‘CND lesbians’ can come at you with the moral authority of William Hazlitt. Last year a petition was handed in to Downing Street demanding that Clarkson be made prime minister: it had 49,500 signatures. It is not easy to think of a time when the British car industry was not in a state of some kind: a state of ...”

“... was over the name. I favoured (homage to Izaak Walton) the Lea spelling, where they went for the (William) Burroughs-suggestive Lee. Inspector Lee. Willie Lee. Customised paranoia: double e, narrowed eyes glinting behind heavy-rimmed spectacles. The area alongside the M25, between Enfield Lock and High Beach, Epping Forest, carries another echo of ...”

“... Exploding Plastic Inevitable, which had various incarnations between January 1966 and its first broad public invitation in April, each of which also involved some combination of Warhol’s dancing fools, slide-projector gels, light shows, silent films and chaos. (Warhol took first billing in all advertisements, above the Velvets, though presumably he just ...”

“... cataract and glade, for long drifting walks through the night, as when Dorothy Wordsworth and William and Coleridge set out to watch the moon rise over the Severn. The association with the country as an authentic native place, defined by appealing local idiosyncrasies, becomes key to the word’s peregrinations. The literary scholar Kathryn Sutherland ...”

“... tragical-historical, tragical-comical-historical-pastoral’. On the tomb of the merchant William Bond (d.1576) in St Helen’s, Bishopsgate, Latin verses describe Bond as a greater merchant than Jason of the golden fleece; in The Merchant of Venice Gratiano declares: ‘We are the Jasons, we have won the fleece.’ The last chapter, on ...”

“... time he deals almost too fully with the troubles of Eliot’s first marriage (compared, say, with William Empson’s very different, idiosyncratic but suggestive analysis of the filial Eliot at the period of The Waste Land) in no way affects this position. Hastings, too, takes as his subject the private life and yet gives us, as both condition and ...”

“... of me, and my geometry, during the journey there – It would have puzzled Euclid … How big and broad the aisle seemed, full huge enough before, as I quaked slowly up – and reached my usual seat! … [I] got out of church quite comfortably. Several roared around, and, sought to devour me … until our gate was reached. I needn’t tell you, Susie, just ...”

“... get more for himself. He knew and admired Hastings, and was a friend of the great orientalist Sir William Jones, scholar of Persian and Sanskrit, and, as Mr Jones, a member of the Club, present at Boswell’s election. When Johnson first wrote to Hastings on 30 March 1774, recommending to him the future Sir Robert Chambers, one of his Majesty’s Judges in ...”

“... almost none of the indirect taxation of necessities common elsewhere. The consequence was a broad diffusion of prosperity, which is not to deny the existence at times of deprivation and want among the not inconsiderable numbers of the very poor. There have been efforts, not very successful, to measure the general standard of living of different ...”

“... the torrid sheet in purple. Her face, also in shadow, is almost featureless – there are two broad strokes of mauve across her cheekbones, like sticking plasters. I can’t convey the subtlety of the colouring (nor can a reproduction). But I can insist on the delicacy and variety of the dipping brushstrokes, on how softened and edgeless everything is: a ...”

“... performing was both a parody and the real thing. Doesn’t the entrance qualification seem rather broad, though? By the end of the 1980s ‘men who had lost lovers, friends or members of their local community to Aids’ was a description of every gay man in America. This is certainly a richer appropriation of widow status than the sentimental claiming of the ...”

“... machine broke down.The man who improved on the vacuum tube was the London-born American physicist William Shockley. After the war, Shockley was employed at Bell Labs, the research branch of the US telephone monopoly, AT&T. He realised that certain chemical elements could perform a similar function of encoding and transmitting 1s and 0s. Conducting materials ...”

“... a brilliant reading of Levi’s work that appreciates both its literary cunning and its broad cultural significance. Gordon’s is the sort of strong interpretation which, like certain performances of classic plays and operas, changes the way we see the work itself. Levi never stopped talking about the camps. Even when he was preternaturally busy ...”

“... the dining room: Confidential Chats with Boys (1911) by the American physician and sex-pamphleteer William Lee Howard. Dr Howard urged teenage boys to ‘sleep on the floor, anywhere: go without sleeping’ rather than share a bed with another boy or a man. And if it couldn’t be avoided, ‘keep awake with your eyes on something you can hit him with. At the ...”

“... America and old experienced Europe. In 1919 Russell traced the pragmatism that Dewey shared with William James to ‘that instinctive belief in the omnipotence of Man and the creative power of his beliefs which is perhaps natural in a young, growing and prosperous country, where men’s problems have been simpler than in Europe and usually soluble by energy ...”