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“... pundits of all lands found themselves blessed by the Zeitgeist, and redoubled their efforts until no open space was without its fairground tent and its impatient queues eager for lessons in portent-reading. As Martin Thom patiently points out over and over again, the trouble was not that the hucksters were mistaken. They were often quite right about what was ...”

“... cities and ‘a pre-Modern formlessness’ in remote, late 20th-century battlefields about which no one cares but the protagonists. Cantering through this slow-motion apocalypse were two new horsemen: environmental degradation and a culture of crime. The article is recycled in the book, with politic changes and elaborations, and the itineraries are much the ...”

“... vibrant and fluent recorded performance. Part of its impact came from the fact that it had no competitors or predecessors (only Wanda Landowska had done it on harpsichord and Rosalyn Tureck, little known outside New York, on piano): the piano music of Beethoven, Chopin, Rachmaninoff dominated the landscape. Gould instantly transformed the geography of ...”

“... toward a Supreme Fiction”. “I said that I thought we’d reached a point at which we could no longer really believe in anything unless we recognised it was a fiction.” Exactly. The ‘place’ was Hartford, Connecticut, but it could have been anywhere. When the American writer travelled to the west of his or her more settled home, dislocation turned ...”

“... Together they brought the women of Govan in league with women in other parts. They agreed that no one should pay their rent. Out there was an unknown land, with pain and broken bodies. The thing to do was to hold your ground. The women’s emotion rose up like smoke, and joined the air of political fact, as if somewhere they could hear the guns, and ...”

“... the artist simply returned home, where he was found sitting serenely cross-legged and wearing no clothes. The King declared this man to be the true artist. ‘Why is it,’ asks Fei Dawei, ‘that even as early as two thousand years ago, behaviour and procedure were seen as “true art” rather than the technique of painting itself?’ A disproportionate ...”

“... beyond philosophy proper. Kafka, for example, notes in his diary how introspection ‘will suffer no idea to sink tranquilly to rest but must pursue each one into consciousness, only itself to become an idea, in turn to be pursued by renewed introspection’. The process results in a hall-of-mirrors effect. Spontaneity is ...”

“... a rigorous regime of self-protection, of course, he would never have been able to write the books. No Enemies of Promise here as for his half-hated friend Connolly. If Waugh had seen a pram in his hall, he would probably have been mortified; his reaction as a writer when his wife had babies was to go away and put up in a ...”

“... loved the furniture in Bowen, the thickness of her detail and its coloured, textured specificity. No doubt I was drawn to the posh pastness of her contemporary world; I would have relished, for instance, the ‘crisp white skirts and transparent blouses clotted with white flowers; ribbons, threaded through’ on the first page of The Last September. (Needless ...”

“... fugitive world of de la Mare’s lyrics, we experience their presence through negatives:But no one descended to the Traveller;      No head from the leaf-fringed sillLeaned over and looked into his grey eyes,      Where he stood perplexed and still.But only a host of phantom listeners      That dwelt in ...”

“... agrees that she was and remains a brilliant natural performer. Whether speaking to a crowded hall or to a single voter on a doorstep or to her fellow pundits in a television studio, she is in her element. It is not just that she is fluent, vivid and engaging: she speaks in a way that erases distance, transforming audience and speaker into a common ...”

“... 1940 ‘nobody dared hold an election.’ It was of course not a question of not ‘daring’. No one even considered a general election, which would at that time have been madness and virtually impossible. Nevertheless in its important facts the book is accurate. And except for its introductory few pages, which are overblown, Bringing the House Down is ...”

“... at film school, because it seemed the most provocative thing I could do,’ von Trier explains. ‘No one really cared how my films looked or how well they did. But this “von” business, on the other hand, really upset people.’ ‘Provocation’s purpose is to get people to think,’ he has said. ‘If you provoke people you give them the credit for ...”

“... the House of Representatives – fight for the right to claim authority over a state that no longer exists. The real forces in Tripoli are the militias that roam the city. In the country as a whole, there are two increasingly hostile power blocs: one consisting of old army units under an ageing general in the east, the other an alliance of the tribal ...”

“... to watch the ‘burlesque’ and ‘tragedy’ of democratic politics unfold. Tocqueville had no particular affection for the Orléans family or the July Monarchy. But he had an instinctive deference for the symbols of tradition and order, and a fondness for heroic gestures that evoked bygone eras of aristocratic grandeur. On a tour of England as a young ...”