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“... purpose may or may not be the subversion of fiction itself. The OAP is vaguely reminiscent of Thomas Pynchon’s underground postal service, the Tristero System, and almost certainly has covert links with Buñuel’s Revolutionary Army of the Infant Jesus, the only comic terrorist organisation in the history of the cinema. In fact, I should like to ...”

“... chivalric ideal in modern society, nor was it to be the last. Already, in 1825, the tall tower of William Beckford’s new baronial hall. Font-hill Abbey, had collapsed without warning. A few years after the Eglinton debacle, one of the day’s leading artists, William Dyce, was commissioned to paint allegorical frescoes on ...”

“... intervals, the volumes plopped from the press, 63 in all, from Jacques Abbadie in 1885 to William Zuylestein in 1900, containing some thirty thousand pages on which 650 contributors recorded the details of 30,000 lives. And, as with the painting of the Forth Bridge, once this great Victorian monument was completed it was time to start all over ...”

“... quarterly called Forum, and set about publishing everyone he admired, including Walker Percy, William Gass and the not yet famous Marshall McLuhan. In 1960, he joined the board of Houston’s Contemporary Arts Association and the following year became the museum’s temporary director. He remained there for just over a year. It was a period of ...”

“... house behind the Tower of London down Seething Lane. They were to visit one of Sam’s superiors, William Batten, surveyor of the navy. The custom was that women should take the first man they saw as their Valentine, so long as he was no relation. The previous year, Elizabeth had selected her own beau; this time it was all planned to further Sam’s new ...”

“... An adequately supported project may fail, but an overlooked one will not succeed. According to the Thomas Theorem popularised by Robert Merton: ‘If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences.’ David Edgerton’s The Shock of the Old, with its ironic echoes of bestsellers by Robert Hughes and Alvin Toffler, is not an attack on ...”

“... is debatable. The OED defines it, capaciously enough, as ‘of, relating to, or characteristic of William Hogarth or his style; resembling or characteristic of the subjects depicted in Hogarth’s work’, and explains that ‘much of the work of Hogarth is characterised by the use of satire to examine questions of morality, and often features vivid ...”

“... to photographic accuracy or, as it seemed to Dante Gabriel Rossetti, literalism; he complained to William Bell Scott that most of the Academy pictures that year were ‘done in prose’. But this was what the general art-viewing public of the mid-Victorian years liked, a picture with a story they could follow and explain to one another. Not that it had to be ...”

“... United States Coal and Coke Company established a mining camp named after the company president, Thomas Lynch, just north of the Cumberland Gap in eastern Kentucky, at the foot of Black Mountain, the highest peak in the state. By the start of the Second World War, more than ten thousand people were living in Lynch, and the mines, which employed four ...”

“... thought that they were enlightening the womb, the last preserve of unreason, at least in Europe. Thomas Dawkes’s The Midwife Rightly Instructed (1736), written in dialogue, includes this exchange between a surgeon and a midwife, who has been instructed to remove the placenta manually:MIDW: Well, but Sir, if I do this, I must be obliged immediately to ...”

“... bêtise, niaiserie, démence’. Two important Enlightenment systematists, R.A. Vogel and William Cullen, made a different decision: in their systems paranoia was enlarged by making it part of the vesaniae, which included mania and melancholia; in Cullen’s system, a disorder of the class vesaniae would involve a lesion of the faculty of ...”

“... Landor), but cites instead David Lynch, Jonathan Franzen, David Foster Wallace, Marcel Duchamp, William Burroughs, Frank O’Hara, Hugo Ball, Geoff Dyer, Kafka, Samuel Beckett, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Muhammad Ali, Joe Louis.Lamb deserves​ much better than this. He deserves, most of all, an account that makes you want to read him. His prose only ...”

“... a painful business.’ In The Merry Wives of Windsor, Parson Evans attempts to show off William Page’s learning to his mother; but when the boy admits he’s forgotten the declension of his pronouns, the schoolmaster at once threatens him with an educative thrashing: ‘If you forget your “qui”s, your “que”s, and your “quod”s, you must ...”

“... 1930s into the literary forgeries perpetrated by two eminent men of the literary establishment, Thomas Wise and H. Buxton Forman. What seems most significant about that story, apart from its being half a century old, is that Carter and Pollard were dealers in rare books, who at the time of their celebrated Enquiry did not hold university ...”

“... It is the document by which, in 1756, the firm of J.&R. Tonson undertook to publish The plays of William Shakespeare, in eight volumes, with the corrections and illustrations of Various Commentators; To which are added notes by Sam. Johnson. This edition, with its much reprinted preface and doggedly commonsensical approach to the text, still exerts a ...”