“... is striking five when we turn back, the waterfall now illuminated under its own self-generated power, the same power that once lit the whole village, and I suppose one day might have to do so again. 8 January. I spend a lot of time these days just tidying up and today I start on my notebooks. Around 1964 I took to ...”

“... when next someone steps onto the stage it’s ankle-deep in water. There is no light at all as the power has immediately to be switched off and when I go into the auditorium (the first night audience now waiting in the foyer ready for the start) there are dim figures moving about the sodden stage, torches flashing in the gloom and firemen clambering up the ...”

“... information could be stripped of the old markers of authority – authority both in the sense of power and in the sense of being reliably accurate – by which we, often without thinking, judged it. It was hard and expensive and required a lot of clever people and technology to design a newspaper page and to print it in hundreds of thousands of copies ...”

“... frustrations with the Civil Service and with the Treasury. Blair reveals that his chief of staff, Jonathan Powell, overheard a phone conversation at the height of the crisis between the two Browns, during which Gordon warned Nick not to give in to Blair’s ‘presidential style’. It is a cliché of the Blair years, and not really true, that his was a ...”

“... already done: by Gill on ‘Salisbury Plain’, by Butler on ‘The Ruined Cottage’, by Jacobus, Jonathan Wordsworth and others. Elsewhere he is less successful. His history is more literary-biographical than intellectual, and he passes by without comment significant work in intellectual history. James Chandler’s Wordsworth’s Second Nature (1984) goes ...”

“... clarifying to uncomplicate things. But this is all a bit too self-consciously feel-good – what Jonathan Meades memorably pegged as the ‘new, accessibly accessible fun-style fun arts’. Art as a kids’ workshop in which no one ever fails. Which is, you might say, lovely in practice but not the least bit interesting as ‘theory’. If everything is ...”

“... last of the great New York intellectuals associated with Partisan Review,’ the critic Jonathan Rosenbaum wrote in a memorial tribute, ‘she was the only one in that crowd who understood and appreciated film in a wholly cosmopolitan manner, as part of art and culture and thought.’ Partisan Review’s​ intellectuals and their English department ...”

“... a teenager called Amy in Amis Senior’s The Green Man, who is a fan of a pop-star called Jonathan Swift.Reading twenty-odd reviews of the same book was (for me) an unusual and unnerving experience. The dominant impression created by this bizarre over-exposure was of an aggregation of nervous tics so enormous that one had to think of them as cultural ...”

“... you could avoid reading him on a university campus, or continue reading him outside one. In Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections (2001), Chip Lambert, a former associate professor of literature in his thirties, decides to purge his library of Marxist cultural critics in order to raise some funds with which to indulge the yuppie tastes of his new ...”

“... your forehead starts to wrinkle? The only two that came unbidden to my mind are by Devo and Cat Power, who gave us wildly different takes on ‘Satisfaction’. (For the record, my own favourite Beatles covers are, in no particular order, by Caetano Veloso, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Harry Nilsson, Bobbie Gentry – and Marvin Gaye, who turns ...”

“... but there were other children in the block with whom I played in the spaces of the flats. Helen, Jonathan, Susan, whose doors I knocked on, with whom I would have tea sometimes, who, occasionally, would have tea with me in my flat. So, I still dream about getting back to roam in the corridors, to climb the fire escape, to play the games and tell myself the ...”

“... the Rounds: A Sort of Love Poem.’ In his interview with Hoy, Hecht considered the strange power of that poem ‘A Hill’. Hecht had discussed the poem with his therapist, he said, and went on: ‘You are perfectly right to see arid and defeated landscapes cropping up in a good number of my poems … They were for me a means to express a desolation of ...”

“... but there are other types of image he returned to just as obsessively. ‘No one has gotten the power in cinema that I feel there is in industry and factory workers,’ he said about Dune. ‘This notion of fire and oil.’ This ‘notion’ is there in the later films, in the car crashes, smoking engines, chromework and tailfins, the polished gun ...”

“... and was built on the site of the old thatched cathedral. It must have carried the great weight of power and newness which factories had in more industrial landscapes. It was where people first learned to remain quiet in large groups, and where they learned about being on time. Until the recent restoration I had never imagined the colour: people must have been ...”

“... parents had reservations when the couple got engaged in 1878: he had no notable ancestors, save Jonathan Edwards (who was only a distant relation); his means were modest and there was a family history of mental illness. Mabel, however, found it in herself to overlook all this. Her first requirement in a husband was sympathy to her ambitions. ‘No man can ...”