“... on hanging group shows (go alphabetical), the painting of gasometers (choose white), and the droit de suite legislative proposals of 1930 (he’s against).Sickert’s commentaries are not simply pungently phrased; many of them retain their power to bite. His own technical experience and the relative cohesiveness of the era’s critical terms allow him to offer ...”

“... a plea for a new canonical openness and for the relevance of Southey to the Romantic scene. Paul Hamilton’s ‘Keats and Critique’ argues that ‘the interchangeability in Keats’s poetry of its ideal status and its political reticence gradually begins to expose the contemporary politicising of the ideal and the idealising of the ...”

“... two magazines considered left-wing – Tribune, under Michael Foot, and the New Statesman, under Paul Johnson. It was a different world. In those distant days, Harold Wilson was the Prime Minister. He was being assailed by ‘left-wingers’, people like me, for being too subservient to the United States Government, with particular reference to the American ...”

“... of human life.’ The modern poet, by contrast, is always sentimental about nature, like a sick man yearning for health. Indeed, the sentimental poet idealises nature much as we (including, self-confessedly, Schiller) sentimentalise the Greeks themselves. The problem for modern literature of this loss of innocence is that, in contrast with the ancient ...”

“... on terror’ relates to the authentic revolutionary state of emergency, first articulated by St Paul in his reference to the ‘end of time’. When a state institution proclaims a state of emergency, it does so by definition as part of a desperate strategy to avoid the true emergency and return to the ‘normal course of things’. It is, you will ...”

“... appetites – for tales, news, gossip or truth. Among the essays is one on Books of Hours by Paul Saenger, who discusses the effect of the ancient discovery of silent reading and the later development of the portable, personal book. He looks at the history of oral versus silent prayer and the consequences of the privacy the silently-read page offers ...”

“... this to say for blood and breath,’ runs the latest one, from A.E. Housman: ‘They give a man a taste for death.’ Are we being directed to hold in mind those other lines of Housman’s? Oh like enough ’tis blood, my dear, For when the knife has slit The throat across from ear to ear ’Twill bleed because of it. Just such a shambles is evoked at ...”

“... Carlyle’s writings, with special attention paid to their political thought’, and Paul Johnson, whose high-pastiche polemic, Wake Up Britain! A Latter-Day Pamphlet (1994), was resolutely slept through. The Carlylean inflection can also be heard in the newspapers and magazines with which these writers are associated: the two Mails, the two ...”

“... franchise, and spam emails offering penis enlargements and fat sums of money from Nigeria. This no man’s land of media culture is Coupland’s home ground. The astonishingly full and varied body of work that began with Generation X in 1991 is populated by alienated characters: a beauty queen, a medium, people caught up in human-interest news stories (high ...”

“... poverty. There is another cloak joke in Don Quixote, about St Martin who divided his with a poor man: ‘from which we may conclude that it was a cold day for such was the saint’s charity that had it been a warm one he would doubtless have given the poor man his whole cloak.’ Cervantes was poor for a purely literary ...”

“... and there is no evidence that he did so, any more than there is reason to suppose that Lorenzo de’ Medici, whose name suggested laurels sacred to Apollo, supposed that people would think him a descendant of that Greek god when he used the laurel as a device, or that the noble Orsini wished to claim kinship with the bears (orsi) by which they announced ...”

“... bureaucratic existence is their only alternative. Here is Japi on his education: Then your old man sticks you in an office. And you realise that the reason you learned all those things was so that you could wet slips of paper with a little brush. And it’s always the same old routine, be there nine o’clock sharp, sit there quietly for hours and hours. I ...”

“... in the seat of consciousness nor at his nerve ends, but in a generalised feeling of being Michel de Montaigne. He was not alone in almost, so to speak, losing it. In the second chapter of Reveries of the Solitary Walker, Rousseau recounts how, on 24 October 1776, outside Paris, he was rushed by an enormous Great Dane. He calculated at once that his only ...”

“... a letter stops to talk – and what enables him to break the ice is that she is a woman doing a man’s job. 8 January. By train to Cambridge on a day of blinding sunshine and bitter cold. We eat our sandwiches on the train, a busy, bucketing electric job that scampers through Shepreth and Foxton and very different from the plodding little steam train I ...”

“... in 1916 John Quinn began collecting his work; he knew the photographers Edward Steichen and Man Ray – and Romanian connections, which were maintained all his life. There is hardly a significant name which does not turn up in some context or other, from Picasso and the Douanier Rousseau to Nancy Cunard and ...”