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“... his head – ‘La, Sir! You’re always fancying things.’ One of the book’s recent champions, Michael Neve, finds it a ‘subtle meditation on the philosophical ludicrousness of love’, a ‘picture of driven desire that, with Freudian exactness, ends up without even an obscure object’. All the while Hazlitt continued his punishing schedule of literary ...”

“... had persuaded RCA to cover the heavy losses incurred by the previous two, this time they put their foot down. Before closing the set with ‘Rock’n’Roll Suicide’, Bowie said: ‘Not only is it the last show of the tour, but it’s the last show that we’ll ever do. Thank you!’ It came as a surprise not only to the audience but to half of the band ...”

“... the strength to flee, got as far as a stretch of open ground bounded by the rim of a thousand-foot precipice, and sat down –‘couched,’ Robin says, ‘like some heraldic beast’. It could escape only by charging the cordon of hunters and beaters. Before that could happen my great-uncle delivered the coup de grâce, at close range. It happened to be ...”

“... screams said to have been heard down the street. I still have the bed, the polish at the foot of it scraped and scratched by my mother’s feet during the initial stages of that reluctant arrival. Had mine been a difficult birth, the persistence with which untoward events occur on and around my birthday would, though I am no believer in ...”

“... Ford and Lewis, to the drowned worlds of J.G. Ballard and Will Self, the dystopian multiverses of Michael Moorcock and China Miéville. Fredric Jameson, considering postmodernism, talks about the ‘hysterical sublime’: a sort of Gothic rapture in contemplation of lastness, the voluntary abdication of power to superior aliens. This was heady stuff for my ...”

“... that or return the publisher’s advance), calling his debut Doings and Undoings. The columnist Michael Kinsley once observed that Al Gore was an old person’s idea of a young person, and Podhoretz was an old critic’s version of a young critic, publishing in the proper publications and bemoaning hairy barbarians like the Beats (‘The Know-Nothing ...”

“... the earth?’ Cormac McCarthy wrote in The Passenger. ‘Your plate-eyed krakens with their eighty-foot-long testicles. Then a big smell and then nothing. Whoops. Where’d everybody go?’As civil engineering, the 16-mile-long bore of the Super Sewer is an achievement to set beside Bazalgette’s web of sewage pipes and tunnels. The Tideway project ...”

“... the songs about the Irish in America missing home were often written by people who had never set foot in the country. From those who left the Blaskets, we have two recent accounts: Ó Catháin’s The Loneliest Boy in the World, written with Patricia Ahern, and Carney’s From the Great Blasket to America (2013). Neither book has any of the originality of ...”

“... by acting as mules, delivering packages to safehouses in the US. But the carrying capacity of a foot-slogger is no match for a commercial trailer, or the hydraulic arm of a towtruck, or a hidden compartment in an outsize SUV. The impressive quantities of narcotics confiscated along the US/Mexican border in 2009-10 (three million kilos of ...”

“... Richardson had insisted they were innocent and had been framed by the police. I recalled that Sir Michael Havers, who led for the Crown in the 1975 trial, had reasoned to the jury that if the Four were innocent, a huge conspiracy to pervert the course of justice must have taken place. Where did this leave Havers’s conspiracy? Had the Court of Appeal ...”

“... the inauguration of the new Bavarian Parliament on 21 February. Going to the opening ceremony on foot, and heedless of the repeated threats to his life he had received since coming to power, he was confronted by an embittered, anti-semitic Bavarian aristocrat called Count Anton von Arco-Valley, who shot him dead. The moral renewal of Bavarian politics was ...”

“... witnessed. Formidably intelligent people describe Tristan in terms of a conversion experience. Michael Tanner speaks of its ‘qualifications for religious status’; while for Roger Scruton, Tristan und Isolde offers nothing less than ‘a sacrificial consolation for the imperfect loves of those who witness it’.In the early days, the expressionistic ...”

“... mapped networks and amassed evidence. In 2021 he brought down the billionaire New York collector Michael Steinhardt, a hedge fund manager also accused of sexual harassment by several women, who admitted that buying risky objects was ‘like an addiction’. Bogdanos raided his Fifth Avenue apartment and seized 180 stolen objects valued at $70 ...”

“... with the production of the film within the film. It’s presided over by a figure called Mr Roque (Michael J. Anderson), whom Tom McCarthy describes in his essay on Lynch’s ‘Prosthetic Imagination’ as ‘almost pure prosthesis, his already tiny, crippled body dwarfed yet further by the spacious, hi-tech chamber from which … he calls the shots’. The ...”

“... they are oblivious to everything else.’ Normal criminals pick up the separate scent of a six-foot-three plainclothes copper in size eleven shoes, but not the queers: ‘to my mind the stronger and the bigger the man the more interested they are in getting to know the other side of him.’ Once he had a chap who was interested in him: ‘I gave him a ...”