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“... boy and then, saying ‘No more Mr Nice Guy,’ steals the child’s crisps. If Walker’s were smart they would make a sequel in which Lineker, making off with the bag of crisps, is stopped in his tracks by Cantona who kicks him and makes him give the crisps back. Then the British Public would be thoroughly confused. 13 February. To Westminster for the ...”

“... someone’s long lens and for whom blood is everything: the Windsors, aka the Firm. Tina Brown, a smart ethnographer bearing a scalpel, engages with this dispiriting bunch as though they, like the Rooneys of that photograph, have yet to evolve.The slice of world that is vouchsafed to the queen and her many dependants, to whom she doles out annual ...”

“... a chronologically arranged selection of Porter’s poems deftly edited by Sean O’Brien and Don Paterson, deals with his Scottish Australian ancestry, and with despair-haunted, hard-drinking, church-building men who have ‘no life but the marking-time of work’. Probably with Porter’s father’s garden in mind, it ends with an image of ‘country ...”

“... dog shit mum and dog shit dad. Is there a dog shit baby? ‘The common excuse,’ according to Don Park, whose blog brought her to notoriety in the United States, ‘was that the girl doesn’t deserve privacy.’ She dropped out of university; if the abuse didn’t stop, she said, she would commit suicide. Twitter didn’t exist in 2005, when dog shit ...”

“... as ‘a poem unsurpassed in the century except by a few of the Sonnets of Shakespeare’ (don’t you just love that ‘a few’? Those were the days). Latterly, Gascoigne’s ingenious uses of multiple narrators have made a number of critics take notice. But in the days when a canon of English authors existed, he was never securely included in ...”

“... true, and much more interesting, to say that she was born after it. The postwar transition from smart Hollywood to stupid Hollywood gets us into the area of all the socio-political implications DiBattista doesn’t deal with, or at any rate hasn’t yet dealt with for publication. The sooner she does, the better. Film history can do without a treatise on ...”

“... Slote, Marc Mamigonian and John Turner takes on board all the research and scholarship done since Don Gifford’s groundbreaking Notes for Joyce (1974, revised and republished in 1988 as Ulysses Annotated by Don Gifford with Robert J. Seidman). It shows Joyce as both systematic in his approach to fact and at times ...”

“... to find such nice people in the local, he replied: ‘I’ve often heard that said over here. I don’t understand it. In the US we go where it suits, and don’t bother about the people.’ Possibly because the staff was prepossessing, but also because the place was comparatively remote from more frequented scenes, an ...”

“... watched over six hours a day in the average American household,’ he wrote in a 1992 essay. ‘I don’t know any fiction writers who live in average American households … Actually I have never seen an average American household. Except on TV.’ He conceptualised the problem in Infinite Jest, the title of which refers to a videotape that’s so hard to ...”

“... interruptions – but without finality. Its nearest equivalent, in this respect, is Byron’s Don Juan, another triumph of digressiveness. ‘I meant it for a poetical Tristram Shandy,’ Byron said of his great comic poem, thinking of how it might be fitted around, and make material of, his life. Tristram Shandy was something entirely different from the ...”

“... rich feel safe from the wreckage, Doc writes in Songs, and people are looking for reasons. The smart say they can’t understand it, and the dumb snort cocaine in rich discos and stomp to a feverish beat. Which is heard all over the country, or at least felt ... Journalism is a Ticket to Ride, to get personally involved in the same news other people watch ...”

“... to the overture to Tannhäuser to a song by novelty guitarist Roy Smeck), plus the feature-length Don Juan – had its première at the Warner Theatre in New York. Warners’ Vitaphone-experiment proved successful: a second programme opened in October, a third in February. Now the Warners were ready to produce a feature with music and incidental dialogue. On ...”

“... which parallels the line of eye contact. Even the unsententious may be inclined to feel that some smart adage about blind youth is neatly embodied here, but Bersani and Dutoit argue that Caravaggio’s paintings provide ‘a visual speculation on the meaning and condition of knowledge’ and that this clever robber is ‘perhaps beginning to realise that ...”

“... ideal, but not essential. For the former, one might nominate Trakl, Laforgue, Keats and Shelley (I don’t think I breathed while I was reading Richard Holmes’s Shelley: The Pursuit all those years ago); for a rare, artful blending of long and short, one can’t do better than Rimbaud and Hölderlin; and for the latter, Hamsun, Yeats, Shaw – and ...”

“... the inevitable Kafka, and a further trinity of mad writers, Hölderlin, Nerval and Christopher Smart. The more genial and indeed congenial William Gass describes Walser more modestly: ‘He was a kind of columnist before the time of columns.’ And a further, more modest name is offered: ‘The signature “Harmless Crank”,’ Gass suggests, ‘could be ...”