“... Millerite sect showed in the 1840s: when their predictions of the world’s end kept missing the mark, they just kept rescheduling.The capture of US public discourse by a narrow millenarian sect deserves some explanation – especially since the sect’s commitment to forever war is sharply at odds with American public opinion and sectarian-backed imperial ...”

“... to a deep admiration for handicraft (though never his own), conceived a ceramic Michael Jackson and chimp Bubbles and hired expert Italian artisans to fabricate it; the result is a centrepiece of the Broad Collection. He could never have executed such work himself; but it was his idea. Was Disney such an artist? Well, he wasn’t exactly like any of ...”

“... is a moment of suspended quotation which would have delighted both Dickens and his modern analyser Mark Lambert:     ‘Adulterer,’ Ralph said calmly, ‘and murderer’.     Sutherland said just as calmly, ‘Piss off or I’ll bust you wide open.’ Just as calmly, but not just as poisedly. Dignity’s preposterousness meets indignity’s ...”

“... On the final night of the relentless presidential primary campaign, Jesse Jackson compared Barack Obama’s victory to the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Erica Jong compared Hillary Clinton’s defeat to watching Joan of Arc burning at the stake. Obama was in St Paul, Minnesota, pointedly in the very arena where the Republicans will hold their convention in September, at times barely audible over the nearly continual cheering of 17,000 fans (with another 15,000 listening outside ...”

“... Breakfast of Champions and reaching its nadir with Slaptick. D is, it must be said, a very low mark – and nothing short of abject when you give it to yourself. The first of these two novels actually wore on its sleeve the author’s doubt about its strengths, and his sense that he should push his work in some new direction. When I first encountered ...”

“... the natural sciences: their business is Verstehen, not the expression of nomic regularities. One mark of this specialness is their essential involvement with normative notions – consistency, consequence, good reason – from which it follows that there can be no reduction of folk psychology to anything purged of the normative. This type of view is ...”

“... said that their country had nothing to parallel France’s Panama scandal, or the seamier side of Mark Hanna’s America, they were right. The fires beneath all the smoke were fairly small. There were, however, at least two areas in which by present-day standards much laxity prevalied. The first was the granting of honours. Even here, some of the trouble was ...”

“... sense is that Stallabrass still wouldn’t find it in himself to praise it. He’s very tough on Mark Wallinger, for example. Discussing Capital, Wallinger’s 1990 corporate portrait sequence of homeless people, Stallabrass decides that ‘despite his laudable intentions, there is something knowing and cold, almost mocking about these works.’ Permission ...”

“... but they also remind us that ‘character’ means both personality, and, in its original sense, a mark impressed, engraved or otherwise made on a surface: a brand or stamp or cut. Peter Simon’s engraving of Fuseli’s ‘The Enchanted Island Before the Cell of Prospero’ for Boydell’s Shakespeare Gallery (1797). The Compleat Drawing-Book is an ...”

“... It was clear that he was an unusually gifted newspaperman, and by the time he had made enough of a mark to be offered the editorship of the Northern Echo he had grown so ‘inordinately ambitious’ that he jumped at it. In Darlington he waged his first campaign, against pollution caused by an ICI factory, in which he received no help at all from the health ...”

“... soundbox – captured the spirit of the new music in the same way that the voice of Mahalia Jackson identified Gospel. John Smith’s discography of Johnny Cash, who was resident in Memphis at the time and also benefited from Phillips’s expertise, contributes to the idea of a movement. Presley’s intelligence, however, has always been in doubt. Joe ...”

“... realism of the Living with Pop exhibition had turned into something else: capitalist realism in Mark Fisher’s sense of the term – not the realistic presentation of capitalism but the recognition that capitalism is the only reality that can ever be imagined. Although the October paintings refer to the German crisis of 1977, they were painted in the same ...”

“... Bataille was often, as Breton remarked, an ‘excrement philosopher’.In Why Surrealism Matters, Mark Polizzotti, a biographer of Breton and translator of many Surrealist texts, makes a good case for the varied influence of the movement, especially regarding sexual politics and anticolonial struggles. He also points to its many complicities. While communists ...”

“... Gathered together last August with their host Alan Greenspan, chairman of the Federal Reserve, in Jackson, Wyoming (which instantly became the world’s premier resort), the central bankers congratulated themselves at length on their success in reducing inflation by keeping real interest rates high; they did not pause to deplore miserable growth rates, but ...”

“... primary school I was surrounded by boys with what I still think of as normal classic names: Simon, Mark, Peter, Andrew, Paul, Martin, Michael, Stephen, Richard, Robert, David. Girls’ names remained more modish: some Sarahs, Anns and Elizabeths and even some residual Marys, but also plenty of Janets, Jackies, Lisas and Debbies, who soared and plummeted ...”