“... an agenda, and it’s closer to the Marx Brothers than Saturday Night Live or The Daily Show. This means the best jokes are casual and anarchic, stumbled on no doubt in the frenzy of writing episode after episode. One of them, though, was stumbled on very early, in 1990, in the episode called ‘There’s No Disgrace like Home’, in which the whole family ...”

“... machine, an amalgam of printing press and broadcaster that would radically democratise the means of communication at virtually zero cost. As any blogger or YouTube star can confirm, this dream didn’t die altogether, but neither did it capture what would turn out to be a more distinctive characteristic of the emerging technology. Twenty years on, it ...”

“... light’. Room’s indifference to such things (he lets fall a note only when he happens to know) means that a reader is given no help in reading Browning’s dedication by this light. Once it dawned on Room that space-saving would demand that all such dedications as these be printed in a mangled form as run-on sequences and not as what they truly are, a form ...”

“... to be from most of our rulers today. In 1950 when it was decided to go ahead with the H-bomb, David Lilienthal remarked: ‘Where this will lead us is difficult to see. We keep on saying, “We have no other course.” What we should be saying is, “We are not bright enough to see any other course.’ ” The interesting question is whether contemporary ...”

“... self-torture. If the present Government’s narrow range of useful and acceptable disciplines means that anthropology and sociology seem destined for slow strangulation, then history, according to current rumours, is to be given a frontal lobotomy. Our present political masters apparently resent the work of professional historians in undermining the ...”

“... to our own pleasure and (the illusion of) altruism is most prominent when there are social means of inducing us to take pleasure in the happiness of others. Elliott Sober and David Sloan Wilson are clear that there are two notions of altruism, as well as two challenges to its possibility, stemming from quite ...”

“... of Arabs into Nazareth, as he calls it, is a national priority. The city was built in the 1950s. David Ben-Gurion was outraged by the presence of so many Arabs in the Galilee when he toured the region in 1953, a few days before he retired for a year and half from his premiership. He appointed the director general of the Ministry of Defence, Shimon Peres, to ...”

“... reminder that, with rare exceptions, photographers find what they come looking for. Not that this means the show is a failure. What soon becomes clear is how much the UK has been read through its social groups: royalty and the aristocracy in the south, working and industrial classes to the north and west. The upstairs downstairs divide is still deeply ...”

“... renders most other fiction meaningless. One can imagine Pynchon and Ballard and Stephen King and David Foster Wallace bowing at Mark Danielewski’s feet, choking with astonishment, surprise, laughter and awe. I feel privileged to be among its first readers. Will I ever recover?’ House of leaves has at least three narrative strands, with at least as many ...”

“... to fillet felines these days.’ Some of us followed Doom because we thought we were too cool for David Blaine. Doom’s tricks were breath control, intricate rhyme schemes, a beating heart beneath the cold veneer, of which he gave us only occasional glimpses. Now you see it, now you don’t.In his six solo studio albums, numerous collaborations and ...”

“... If this is the case when the ‘facts’ are right, how much more so when they are wrong? Hugh David’s book about Stephen Spender misleads in every way, factually as well as aesthetically, although in the general welter of disinformation it is barely possible to distinguish fact from treatment. As David’s previous ...”

“... Is there a British Marxism? David McLellan’s new book offers, implicitly, an answer. In his comprehensive survey of ‘Marxism after Marx’, one of the 24 chapters is devoted to British Marxism – and it is almost the shortest in the book. After a brief history of the British Left, he mentions the good work of some Marxist historians and economists ...”

“... in an eternity of vain research along endless shelves.’ Jump forward seventy years, and for David Lodge’s Pooteresque Adam Appleby, the BM is a cosy, quintessentially safe asylum. Adam’s working life there is a matter of daily comforting rituals, as when he cools his research-fevered brow on the downstairs men’s lavatory cistern. The BM shelters ...”

“... commonplace had found a champion who could wear its colours with all the ceremony of greatness.’ David Skal’s new biography of Stoker follows his 2004 study, Hollywood Gothic, which managed to take Dracula on page, stage and screen seriously, but not too seriously. It becomes clear reading the Cambridge Companion to ‘Dracula’ how difficult it is to ...”

“... to staff the opposition’s attack did the line change – without apology. Grozny – the name means ‘terrible’ or ‘threatening’ – is a town of some 400,000 people, the only town of size in Chechnya. It is poor even by post-Soviet standards, with a few large administration buildings grouped round Freedom Square, a large oil refinery on the ...”