“... it, a girl in a dirndl beckoning seductively. ‘Good morning, Sales Ledger, this is Martine, how may I help you?’ I have been put through.Phone-hold music is a late, trivial but characteristic effect of the technical revolution which over the past century has transformed the way we encounter music. Until the development of the radio and the ...”

“... sculpture. Roussel declares it his duty to disclose this secret method, so that future writers may benefit from his innovations. Though the essay reveals, with a multitude of examples, how Roussel wrote certain of his books, it doesn’t attempt to explain why he developed and adopted such singular procedures. He directs our attention to the psychologist ...”

“... mend cars, keep dogs, but still have wondrously youthful chests and are always up for it. Dogs may mark the point at which Sallis and his deconstructed/reinvented crime novel break away from the form as we once knew and loved it. Wasn’t Humphrey Bogart as Roy ‘Mad Dog’ Earle, in Raoul Walsh’s film of W.R. Burnett’s High Sierra, undone by a ...”

“... last point was. In the absence of ground troops, or even the threat of ground troops, an enemy may move freely among civilians and do its worst. That is more or less what happened. The KLA, where they mattered at all, were powerless to tie down the Serbian security forces and distract them from atrocity, as a proper infiltration of Nato ground troops might ...”

“... Two days after May Day, the festival of labour, a story appeared on the front page of the Financial Times under the typically downbeat headline: ‘Work permit shake-up targets skill gap.’ It told of the Government’s introduction of a permit system which would allow rapid entry into the UK for foreign professionals and highly skilled technicians – doctors, nurses, software engineers, information technologists and others ...”

“... egotism, envy, rancour, meddling, mediocrity and bad writing – imperfect heroism indeed. This may seem horribly unfair. It did to Todd when other people’s accounts of Wollstonecraft’s life were at issue. Taken by themselves, out of emotional and especially epistolary context (for it is the letters more than anything else that do her in), the events of ...”

“... thinks, is that showing in a famous gallery will get you plenty of attention: even though it may appear to you that nearly everyone hates Jeff Koons’s work, the critical point is that people take time and effort to hate it, publicly and at length, and this investment of attention effectively endows Koons’s work with more importance than the work of ...”

“... ideas he hears people talk about. When Rumsfeld formulated the Bush doctrine of pre-emptive war in May 2002, Woodward reports that the secretary of defense heard from a friend that the notion of pre-emptive war ‘went back centuries’ and that Sir Thomas More had written about pre-emption in Utopia. This is true: More did write about the ...”

“... and insight, of any political sense and of either a romantic or realist ideology. Muybridge may not have been a completely dedicated imaginative artist, but he wasn’t just a technical inventor aiming simply to conquer movement with the camera. Solnit points to a conscious poetry in his different sorts of picture. He was never merely the detached ...”

“... channel, a thoroughfare, an axis of change.The basis of Phillips’s oblique affinity with Brontë may lie in their shared conviction that the storyteller, real or imaginary, must already be in place – however uneasily – before the story can be told. The introduction to Phillips’s A New World Order: Selected Essays (2001) sets each of four separate ...”

“... 5500 in 1977. The yard had just two orders on its books – the Type 42 and the rig – and so in May 1984 another thousand job cuts were announced.The stagers wanted to strike. Albertina had already secured them several significant victories; under his leadership, they had been reclassified as semi-skilled workers, which got them a pay bump. And he’d ...”

“... rust-coloured, iron-containing spa waters were once very fashionable; milk-white glacial meltwater may or may not be potable; and naturally bubbly spring waters command a fancy price. You do not want to see rotting organic matter floating in your water and, even if you cannot see it, smell often betrays its putrefying ...”

“... easily repeated. It’s possible Labour should have supported a soft Brexit as agreed by Theresa May; but that would be to ignore May’s disinclination to compromise and her vulnerability to backbench rebellion, not to mention the likelihood that such a move on Labour’s part would have blown apart the shadow cabinet and ...”

“... had gone back and forth across the Channel, but it was not until Herschel made a trip to Paris in May that they realised they weren’t talking about the same thing at all.Daguerre’s images were like mirrors: uncanny one-offs recorded on thin, silver-coated copper plates. Talbot’s were, in his own description, ‘lilliputian’ soft-focus relics of what ...”

“... she had left in the oven would get too dry at Gas Mark 4. Perhaps 3 would have been better. Dry it may well have been but there was no need to have worried. The thieves took the oven and the casserole with it. The Ransomes lived in an Edwardian block of flats the colour of ox-blood not far from Regent’s Park. It was handy for the City, though Mrs Ransome ...”