“... different in other translations; but, then again, reading Brill and Joan Riviere and Katherine Jones and Robson-Scott had not been illuminating. I didn’t, in other words, really think that Strachey was the problem with Freud. I was quite happy to be locked up in Strachey’s Freud and the myth of the Standard Edition and assume that it was more or less ...”

“... with another dog, Emily waded in at once while ‘several other animals,’ the Haworth stationer John Greenwood reported, ‘who thought themselves men, were standing looking on like cowards as they were.’ She forced the dogs apart, ‘dredg[ing] well their noses with pepper’ and sent them packing. When Branwell drunkenly set light to his ...”

“... them, when they caught the wrong fish, to dump it.As I listened to Hardie I thought of something John Fenty, the local businessman who owns Grimsby Town football club, had told me a couple of days earlier: how he got his start in 1984 hiring transport out to a local trader who drove around the colliery villages inland, selling fish factory discards to ...”

“... be considered a discovery of the 1990s. The first big show of his work I saw was in 1996; in 1999, John Ashbery published a book-length poem entitled Girls on the Run, the cover of which bore an arresting Darger watercolour showing some of the Vivian Girls in panic-stricken flight. The ‘literariness’ and epic ‘virtual world’ quality of Darger’s work ...”

“... the BBC who couldn’t be public, but we can name them now – Ken Trodd, Ken Loach, Tony Garnett, John McGrath. You know, from the cultural milieu. There was Clive, Fred Halliday, later Sheila Rowbotham got involved, and Roger Smith, script editor at the BBC. The French May erupted as we were about to launch the first issue, which had come out looking ...”

“... for future projects: Red Shift, a publishing imprint, after the Alan Garner novel; an essay on John Akomfrah’s film triptych The Unfinished Conversation, featuring the memories of Stuart Hall; a book of essays about Kanye West. These interests are all evident in Fisher’s work too.The second memorial lecture was given in January by the American ...”

“... of repression in which men like Elliott Abrams (now Deputy NSA and special assistant to Bush) and John Negroponte (now National Intelligence director) connived during the 1980s in Central America. The brazen persecution of Sahrawis is once again common, after a three-year interval of relative calm, following Hassan II’s death. In 2001, Mohamed Daddach, a ...”

“... hospitals in unmarked vans, and unloaded at back entrances. I heard about despair. I heard General John Abizaid, commander of US Central Command, say of the insurgents: ‘I don’t think that they’re growing. I think that they’re desperate.’ I heard about hope. I heard General Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, say: ‘I came away ...”

“... of experienced EPA staffers and scientists,’ Rebecca Leber reported early this year in Mother Jones, ‘while putting old friends and industry reps in charge of key environmental decisions.’ The military and charter flights he booked for himself, his $2 million security detail, his payment of $120,000 to an opposition research outfit to spy on hostile ...”

“... kneecapped by Ronnie, joins Firm, TV anecdotes, celebrity pallbearer, shakes hands with Vinnie Jones) had done their job, turning poverty fables into designer villainy. On Hoxton Square, if anyone cares to notice it, is a blue plaque for the local physician, James Parkinson, who identified and described the neurological disease that carries his name. But ...”

“... procedures. Also about painters he admires (Titian, Rembrandt, Velásquez, Ingres, Matisse, Gwen John) and those he doesn’t: da Vinci (‘Someone should write a book about what a bad painter Leonardo da Vinci was’), Raphael and Picasso. He prefers Chardin to Vermeer, and dismisses Rossetti so violently as to induce pity. He is not just ‘the worst of ...”

“... the Department of Health and Social Security to block imports from the US.In the same year, Dr John Craske, director of the Public Health Laboratory Service, co-ordinated a ‘hepatitis study’ to establish which blood products were most likely to transmit the various strains of hepatitis. Forty-five pupils at Treloar’s were enrolled: each was given ...”

“... possible without its layers and hyperlinks, the infinite opportunities it opens for research: on John Amos Comenius, for example, whose idea of ‘pansophism … a dream of information available to everyone’ she discusses as a precursor to ‘Wikipedia, which I admire and support’. In The Books of Jacob, the news about the mycelial origins of the world ...”

“... building, a 16th-century revision of the 13th-century church founded by the Knights of St John. The Hole is a statement and it is properly capitalised. The labourers, a self-confessed art collective, work the Hole by hand, with pick and shovel, turn and turn about: four days to complete a grave shaft, without any of the tortured grinding and ...”

“... we were all such boys.’ This is how I remember my early days working for the BBC in the 1960s. John Fortune, John Bird, Keith Waterhouse and Willis Hall: we were all such boys too and it seemed such play. Less play was Beyond the Fringe, but that had its sillier side. Dudley Moore had an act – never, I think, done in ...”