“... and other reptiles. Planting one’s flag on a root sheath of hair, significant though it may have been in the chronicles of biological discovery, does not rank in glamour with the exploits of Captain Scott and Sir Edmund Hillary. Hydrozoa are commonly known as jellyfish, and Huxley seems to have devoted a lot of time in the 1840s to examining the ...”

“... this book, although it is central to Thomson’s development. The problem facing Thomson scholars may be that he left no clear account of the role religion played in his stylistic conversion, or at least no account as unequivocal as that of his near contemporary, George Gilbert Scott, the most prolific of the English Goths. Reading Pugin, Scott recounted in ...”

“... outside a blanket shop that had a booming PA system was followed by a cup of tea. Glastonbury may be a full-on celebration of hedonism but for most of the people involved, drugs and dancing all night are just part of their way of life. An exception must be made for the man who was lying in the middle of a field talking to a blade of grass. It was ...”

“... intended to or not, prefigures all too exactly the experience of reading Landscape and Memory. We may not know where the wide meanders of a river are taking us, but we know they will take us somewhere; reading this book, I felt like one of those Australian explorers who believed that, by analogy with the geography of other continents, there must somewhere be ...”

“... to have left the plains of Troy and soared into intergalactic space; at any moment the Klingons may come to fight at Hector’s side. And the verse has become more staccato, the content more trivial. Here is Priam in his palace:   ‘Who’s there?’   ‘Manto, sir.’   ‘Manto?’   ‘Yes, sir. Your youngest son.’   ‘Shine the ...”

“... fairytale. Often, Carter’s prose is brilliantly suggestive, at once playful and black: ‘May progressed slowly. The white lilacs in the churchyard where Honey said Ghislaine had been raped and hurt browned at the edges and reeked of halitosis and finally dropped down dead.’ This was Carter’s great gift – this stab of surrealism, this sharpness ...”

“... in the wind – all things animated. Soutine’s intentions, the way the work of other painters may have influenced him, can only suggest ways of looking. In the most important matters the paintings must speak for themselves. What is at issue is not what Soutine felt and thought as he thrashed or stroked a canvas but how we feel and think as we look at the ...”

“... and who relish the depiction of Tina Brown’s New Yorker as a salon for the rich and famous, may still feel that Washington Babylon gives equal opportunity for women a bad name. Dismissing the difference made by the President’s Supreme Court appointments, Cockburn and Silverstein worry not at all about the criminalisation of abortion and ...”

“... and goes on: To recrudesce is to become raw again or renew morbid activity, as a wound or ulcer may, or metaphorically a pestilence. or vice or other noxious manifestation. That being so ... what have Mr Laver and Lord Melbourne done that their appearance should be a r.? Nothing, except fall into the hands of journalists who like POPULARISED TECHNICALITIES ...”

“... and there are fears that, as in Italy a few years ago, a whole generation of political leaders may have to be sacrificed. There is no doubt that the political class has been badly frightened by the public response to the paedophile affair – and been galvanised into quite untypically rapid action. Even King Albert, an easy-going monarch who involves ...”

“... between an event and the media reflection of it, between fact and fiction, is even less stable. In May 1992, for instance, shortly after the Los Angeles riots, the Vice-President of the United States, Dan Quayle, blamed that eruption of violence on the eponymous heroine of the television sitcom Murphy Brown, who was ‘mocking the importance of fathers, by ...”

“... his extension of dialectics from history to nature courts precisely this danger. Othello may be said to be internally contradictory, but in what sense is an onion? What of the case that contradictions apply to the realm of meaning rather than of matter, and can be used of badgers and bananas only in some far-fetched metaphorical sense? Both history ...”

“... quite a simple reason: to make a strange name look stranger still. Whoever or whatever Salammbô may turn out to be, whether place or person, he, she or it cannot be French. There is a first evidence of that in the unnatural combination of a double m followed by a b; and the final circumflexed ô clinches it. Salammbô is a Punic name, and some measure at ...”

“... and studied without anyone having to leave town. Hobbs has been speaking to some of the people who may one day end up incarcerated there: bad businessmen, dope-dealers and racketeers and thieves and threateners, many of them just the kind of people whose misbehaviour could also have led them to a messy end in that icy country lane. One of Hobbs’s previous ...”

“... If I’m not worth your making an exception for me even in some STUPID details then I may as well go to Hell directly, and if I am worth it and you don’t do it then – you might go there.  The whole business is too stupid and too beastly to go on writing about it so – L.W.Wittgenstein to Bertrand Russell:During the last week I have thought ...”