“... birds that flit and scurry and sing and build in our gardens. They are like iridescent spray: the rose-flush on the breast of a male chaffinch, the gold ring round the eye of a blackbird, the jet-black cap above the slatey body of a great tit. Sparrows are said to have become much less common, but 31 of them have frequented my garden in the past seven ...”

“... know the ‘state they were in’. This kind of news-writing and storytelling combined makes Mark Twain, the famous author of ‘The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County’, look like a Jehovah’s Witness delivering a Sunday sermon. I must remind you that Mark Twain never got the Nobel Prize for Literature. It ...”

“... of several conversations between them, Tarrou recounts his personal history. Afterwards, to mark their new friendship, the two men go for a night-time swim, using their passes as ‘frontline’ workers to get out onto the pier. It is the novel’s unique moment of shared pleasure. ‘Of course a man should fight for the victims,’ Rieux says as they ...”

“... found it by accident,’ Werner writes, ‘in the Amherst College Library, when it fell (rose?) out of an acid-free envelope. If I had not held it lightly in my hands, I would never have suspected the manner in which it was assembled … Look at it here, flying on the page, vying with light.’ Behold, Werner’s sacramental tone urges, a saint’s ...”

“... the assayer’s department at the US Mint in Philadelphia, beginning on a salary of $5 a day that rose, in nearly thirty years’ service, to only $2500 a year, really did somehow challenge and defeat the crooked umpire (whom the young Pound goes on to suggest might have been bribed), this was very much the exception rather than the rule. Pound’s casually ...”

“... largely forgotten: Seguin de Badefol, le Petit Meschin, Conrad Landau, Jacopo dal Verme. A handful rose clear of the ordinary run of successful adventurers to higher influence and more lasting fame. No 14th-century mercenary captain rose as high as Francesco Sforza did in the 15th century: he married the only child and ...”

“... to the argument about exactness and cogency on which Aristotle is to be believed: ‘It is the mark of an educated mind to expect that amount of exactness in each kind which the nature of the particular subject admits. It is equally unreasonable to accept merely probable conclusions from a mathematician and to demand strict demonstration from an ...”

“... wrestled with the desire to be praised openly for his denial of worldly values’.Cut from here to Mark Twain’s ‘The Story of a Good Little Boy’ (who does this remind you of?):Jacob had a noble ambition to be put in a Sunday school book. He wanted to be put in with pictures representing him gloriously declining to lie to his mother … and pictures ...”

“... the symbol of surrender, but instead demands that the surrender leave an irreversible physical mark?’ ‘What sort of religion?’ In the end, it is the German who suffers. And the Jews – this story comes close to suggesting – are finally answerable just for being who they ...”

“... the successive stages – blackface minstrelsy, African fantasy, cosmopolitan Modernism – that mark Baker’s journey from home, a ‘primitive little black girl’, as Paris Soir saw it, who was becoming a ‘great artist’. Or as Time magazine’s insulting review of her 1935 American tour put it, ‘a St Louis washerwoman’s daughter’ had ‘stepped ...”

“... of odours in France. He makes no reference to the pioneering work on early modern smells by Mark Jenner, a British historian at the University of York. But Muchembled’s guiding assumption, that human reactions to smells are not innate, but are shaped by experience, is as valid for England as it is for France. Our pleasure in smelling a ...”

“... new to the yard, pissing out their territory.The younger and the older versions of Parton in Run Rose Run are under the control of this guy. The story appears to be flattering to the presiding superstar, as all ghosted fictions must, yet the road from desperation to triumph has never before, in Dolly’s long history of perfect self-articulation, been so ...”

“... 1594 – over a year after Marlowe’s death – when it was played by the Admiral’s Men at the Rose theatre. The takings were high (£3 12s.) but Henslowe did not mark the play as new, and this was almost certainly a revival. A reminiscence by Thomas Middleton of a performance ‘when the old Theater crackt and frighted ...”

“... poem ‘The Flaw’, addressed to a woman lying beside him: ‘Dear Figure curving like a question mark’. Callisto’s girlfriend ‘lay like a tawny question mark facing him’. In any case, Pynchon now warns us not ‘to underestimate the shallowness of my understanding of entropy’, or of those scientists the story ...”

“... the High Victorians who scraped away the ivy and invented ‘archaeology’. In the 20th century Rose Macaulay wondered whether, after the horror of total war, any artist could ever again get pleasure from the sight of destruction. The evidence of Ruin Lust suggests that artists have lost some confidence, if not interest, in the subject. Keith Arnatt’s ...”