“... Year wasn’t celebrated. You wouldn’t catch George Bush making that kind of mistake. Babylon may have been destroyed, but the traditions of its kings live on: witness the multimillion-dollar maximum-security inauguration extravaganza in Washington on 20 January – or, for that matter, the annual state opening of ...”

“... he says, if he was going to spend months working on a face it should be one he liked. Styles may change, but some things just keep coming back. Jean-Michel Basquiat’s 1984 Brown Spots (Portrait of Andy Warhol as a Banana) is a really nice picture, if a little mysterious – the best the catalogue can do is suggest that the partly peeled banana with ...”

“... of Iowa, who says in his new book, Body Heat: Temperature and Life on Earth (due from Harvard in May), that ‘Pluto is cold; Chicago in January is merely inconvenient.’ For those of us still languishing in the dark ages of terrestrial analogue TV, the gloom is deepened by the fog that currently envelops BBC2’s schedules: the Winter Olympics. The last ...”

“... new greasiness on her, she’s wringing her hands in grief or in greediness or in both. * So … may the words of her mouth and the meditations of her heart be acceptable. Come on, God! Oh Lord. And her grabbiness. I’m Sure I Love and I Really I took notice of the protrusion of my wife’s mouth that then drooped and of every buttoned-up button on her ...”

“... everything. She waited for a lullthen ran out again and yelled: All hail, whoeveryou may be, and rejoice – for my mistress,who was in such pain, is delivered by the action of Zeusand has a fine and healthy son!Eileithyia springing to her feet, limbs flying apart,came towards the girl in disbelief to shake her,to find if it could be real, that ...”

“... since October.On the happy feast of Ruadanevery beak is opened, and from this,the seventeenth of May, the cuckoocalls non-stop in her thicket.In Tallaght, birds pause their songson the ninth of July for Mael Ruain,undefeated by the carrion crow,the bird of war. We pray for her protection.Across cold seas the barnacle geese arriveon the day of Ciaran the ...”

“... A version of ‘Solo de lune’ by Jules LaforgueI smoke, spread outBeneath the evening sky on the top deckOf a careering stagecoach, every boneIn my body rattling, jangling – but my soulIs a dancing Ariel, my soulWhirls beyond bitterness and cloyingHoney, beyond the passingRoads and hills and valleys and evenMy own tobacco fumes … and dancing it recallsThat we fell crazily in love … and yet we partedWithout mentioningThe fact: spleen drove me away, spleen, all-Invading spleen ...”

“... tells of the manner in which he treated one of his patients – treated and of course, as you may imagine, cured. One morning he placed Mr A., his patient, in a shower-room. He makes him recount in detail his delirium. ‘But all that,’ said the doctor, ‘is nothing but madness. Promise me not to believe in it any more.’ The patient hesitates, then ...”

“... conservative Hard SF writers of the 1980s, Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle.‘Extrapolation’ may be a purer ideal. The term is imported from mathematics: a writer, keenly observing the world around them, can measure its trends and implications, then offer persuasive suppositions about what comes next. Yet, like multi-tasking or Tantric sex, extrapolation ...”

“... a mother figure of one’s choosing. ‘This mother who is also a stranger,’ Perry writes, ‘may thus enable the heroine’s independent moral existence.’ Mothers get in the way in fiction: they take up space that is better occupied by indecision, by hope, by the slow growth of a personality, and – as the novel itself develops – by the idea of ...”

“... that promoted the acceptability of homosexuality – was not as straightforwardly prejudiced as it may have seemed. It was dressed up at the time as an attempt to defend the integrity of the traditional family unit and the Christian values associated with it. But the matter at hand was not, for Thatcher, primarily about sexuality. Rather, it reflected her ...”

“... I do not.’ Five days later, ‘there are accounts of the Hitler regime cracking.’ Then, on 5 May 1940, ‘I prophesy that [Chamberlain] will weather this storm.’Channon’s mutterings seem to confirm the view that many members of the English upper class were appeasers and defeatists, if not crypto-Nazis, as does Nicolson’s comment in ...”

“... system Lansley wants it to be. The way it works, crudely speaking, is this. Every so often – it may be every year, or every two or three – the Department of Health is asked to make its pitch to the Treasury for the amount of money it thinks it should get from the overall tax pot, and then is told how much it will actually get. Most of the money comes from ...”

“... huge success, with both critics and audiences. ‘Oscar Wilde,’ the New York Times announced, ‘may be said to have at last, and by a single stroke, put his enemies under his feet.’ There is no evidence that Wilde went home to his wife and children on his return from Algiers: he seems to have remained in various hotels in London. Around 17 February he ...”

“... break into aphoristic fragments, burst into song. Keep your mind in hell and despair not; you may be weaker than the whole world, but you are always stronger than yourself: it’s fine to read Love’s Work and its epigrams as good advice for living in extremis, but they also illustrate an approach to logic, speculation, dialectics.Commodity ...”