“... had important repercussions in many of the humanities and social sciences; but no discipline was more profoundly shaken than the history of art. Throughout the postwar era, the vast majority of art historians had championed the canonical achievements of European visual high culture: in the wake of the events of 1968 they suddenly awoke to find themselves ...”

“... Kate Moss done up as Ziggy Stardust. The picture is a monument to improbable staying power. It’s more than two decades since Moss was photographed by Corinne Day for the Face, those instantly iconic black and white images of a skinny 16-year-old on Camber Sands, wearing no make-up and very few clothes, grinning through her freckles and pointy teeth, all at ...”

“... Welles’s Touch of Evil.To Murch, who has won three Academy Awards and been nominated for six more, film editing is a sensual ‘full-body’ experience: ‘a kind of dance, a choreography of images and sounds in the flow of time, forged in movement, eventually crystallising into permanence’. This embrace is a kind of erotic surrender to the unique ...”

“... what it is, but they should ban it.’Another time, she complained that the woman next door had more TV channels than her. ‘That’s because she’s got a Smart TV, mum,’ my brother said. ‘We could get you one and you’d have all the channels you want.’ The following week it was all set up and Gerry was showing her how to use the remote control. He ...”

“... poems, and his most interesting so far. Whereas, in the earlier books, he didn’t do a great deal more than exercise the quirky, oblique lyricism which has become his personal signature, he puts it here to the service of an idea, or complex of ideas, which constitutes a private poetry of departure. An ‘inner émigré’, in Seamus Heaney’s phrase, he ...”

“... celestial clockwork. That was in the 17th century. Now medicine has become, in the words of Lewis Thomas, the youngest science; and the kind of wanton incompetence that did for Josef Shklovsky has passed into history, at least in the West. Or has it? In 1983, the Journal of the American Medical Society published the results of a study on 100 deaths, all shown ...”

“... and already admired as a composer before enlistment; in the trenches poetry had occupied him more and more and, when he returned afterwards to music, the poetry continued. The asylum cut him off, therefore, from what had been a life of continuous intellectual companionship – in music, poetry and trench-life. In the ...”

“... the last four leaders of the United Kingdom Independence Party, then you really ought to get out more. And no, none of them was or is Nigel Farage, although of the ten leaders the party has had in the past ten years, he did fill the post three times. Ukip has been the most successful single-issue movement in England since the suffragettes, but it has been ...”

“... abolition’, in four years’ time, or seven, when the time was right. And even that more moderate resolution went too far for the House of Lords, which rejected the principle of abolition on any timetable, at least until the Lords had conducted its own investigation, which was repeatedly postponed during the French and then the Haitian ...”

“... than Latin, so the title translates roughly as ‘Fragments of Things in the Vernacular’. The more obvious meaning, ‘Fragments of Everyday Things’, is also present, and perhaps ironic – to be disappointed in love is indeed a common experience, though when viewed through the distorting lens of 14th-century poetry it becomes something complicated and ...”

“... practical expression to the idea that art matters that make Crawford’s apology for a book ‘more ponderous than its subject deserves’ unnecessary. Ashbee’s ideas were a legacy of Ruskin and Morris: the Ruskin who could write of a little girl he saw in ill-fitting hand-me-downs when he was lecturing in Oxford that ‘nothing spoken about art’ could ...”

“... as it must have been in Hardy’s, in Hudson’s and in Jefferies’s days, if the army, and more recently the air force, had not got hold of it. As it is, the army is up in Salisbury Plain with towns of barracks and genteel soldiers’ housing and with all the mess of tin huts and tank tracks, and the air force is down in the northern plain with the ...”

“... next, which looks like the front of a Eurostar train, for M; while in 1819 the British polymath Thomas Young thought the lion stood for OLE; the Eurostar for MA; the two feathers for I; and the bent line, probably a fold of cloth, for OS: ‘Thus we have precisely PTOLEMAIOS.’What Champollion did was unsheathe Occam’s razor, dispense with syllabograms ...”

“... 16 and a bit years had earned him the sobriquet ‘the Mad Bomber’. The Bomber had planted more than thirty explosive devices, favouring public places such as cinemas, train stations, libraries and phone booths. He hadn’t killed anyone but his bombs were becoming bigger and the injuries they were inflicting were growing worse. In their desperation ...”

“... into the Confucian Book of Songs. In the Modernist era, the poets, as Pound wisecracked, have been more interested in Muses than Moses and though bits of the Psalms have inevitably been embedded in poems, new translations have become the province of theologians and academics. The latest is a handsome edition, complete with the requisite red ribbon, by Robert ...”