“... love story’. Opening Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes we read, inside the front cover, white on black in Barthes’s handwriting: Tout ceci doit être considéré comme dit par un personnage de roman. What follows is text and pictures, a fractured autobiography, a dictionary of personal themes, arranged alphabetically. A fiction? Not exactly. Barthes on the ...”

“... the painful tenderness that animates it, how to see the withered eyes, the previously indomitable black hair now defeated like the rest and going white, the hardened arteries, the blocked kidneys, the strained heart, the defeated appetite for life, the slow, heavy walk, the mind whose hopes were once invincible now knowing that it has nothing left to hope ...”

“... by the head of serials, Jonathan Powell, produced by the Birmingham regional drama head, Michael Wearing, and scheduled before Martin had finished the scripts. Third, as a result of its plural structure, the department had gained and kept its reputation as a producer-led, oppositional space, not just for Edge of Darkness, but for Alan Bleasdale’s ...”

“... naive argument that he might not say such-and-such about absolute freedom in America if he were black. An incredulous pause, a bulge in the vinous features and then the outraged roar, ‘But I’m not black, yer daft booger!’ Fond, perhaps over-fond of recalling his days as a working-class Yorkshire socialist lad, he ...”

“... Channel 4 on 28 August, which showed autopsy footage of aliens who crashed in New Mexico in 1947, Michael Moore’s TV Nation described the Jerusalem Syndrome, which affects a similar kind of banana, in a different kind of way. Visitors to the Holy City dress up as characters from the Bible and stay on in town waiting for the end of the world. ‘The Lord ...”

“... government. However unfair to John Major it might be, as an electoral burden Iraq isn’t Black Wednesday. The Tories did well in the local elections, but not spectacularly well. More interesting is their performance in opinion polls. Although they are polling above their general election level, the difference is slight. Given the workings of the ...”

“... vignettes like Chatwin’s, humorous and on occasion startling. The best of them are memorable. Michael Ignatieff watches Chatwin ‘like an old baboon’ under a mulberry tree in the south of France, having his hair combed by his wife. The ravenous Francis Wyndham and James Fox spoon up a pitifully notional soufflé made from wild strawberries which they ...”

“... believed him to be at fault, as in his personal attitude towards official and public reactions to Michael Fagan’s invasion of the Queen’s bedroom. Already, after Lord Mountbatten’s murder, McNee, with the approval of the Palace and the Home Secretary, had appointed a working party of his own senior officers to review current policy and practice for the ...”

“... spent almost entirely in food and prayer, and remembrance of things past.’ When he chances on a black lawyer violently opposed to Nkrumah, the man is ‘obviously a Girondin of the most property and class-conscious kind’, while a frustrated teacher near Kumasi is ‘like the young Russian intellectuals in the novels of Turgenev’. Thomas belonged to the ...”

“... group of people, and if, in a nightclub, you bumped into someone with a gigantic 16-inch, charcoal-black conk, it by no means meant that they had anything to do with the music industry … pejoratively, the press started to call young groups ‘haircut bands’.Not the least important of these self-conscious funsters was a band from Beckenham called Haircut ...”

“... without the other. Those who have both will find that, among contemporaries, Christopher Reid and Michael Hofmann are classified as love poets but Craig Raine and Tony Harrison as blue versifiers. Only a few poets make both, including Seamus Heaney, who has two poems unworthy of him in the Whitworth (one about unfreezing a vaginal pump, one about a ...”

“... politically dynamic sequence of intersecting discursive practices’. I bet he drinks Carling Black Label. Of the position papers, the most confidently stimulating is Alan Sinfield’s essay on dramatic reworkings of Shakespeare, which awards two cheers to Charles Marowitz, none to Stoppard. The only solidly informative piece, though, is Ann Thompson’s ...”

“... themselves, and all these variables may be controlled for effect. There can be art in this, and Michael Fried argues that within Western painting there is a special tradition of realism, stemming at least from Caravaggio (who, he reminds us, painted a Medusa). In such pictures it is not that a shocking effect is due to reality being let in through pictorial ...”

“... The Authenticity of ‘Prometheus Bound’ (1977). In a recent edition of the play in translation, Michael Ewans argues that ‘in dramatic style and technique, as well as language and poetic style, Prometheus is markedly different from, and inferior to, the six other dramas’ in the Aeschylean canon. Ewans dates the play to c.440-430BC, twenty years after ...”

“... on for advice, and when he arrived at the grotto he received a visitation from the Archangel Michael, who ordered him to consecrate a Christian altar on the site. It’s not known what happened to the man with the arrow in his forehead, but the result of his misadventure was the famous Santuario di San Michele. In 999 AD, the Holy Roman Emperor, Otto ...”