“... 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 ...”

“... Buenos Aires, where two workers are scrubbing skulls with pink and yellow toothbrushes. In the hall, a commercial baker’s cart is stacked with bones drying on cookie sheets, like pastries in a witch’s bakery. Baby I love your way sings the radio as Emilia slides her finger into the eye socket of a skull. I wonder what someone would think if they ...”

“... 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 once so English, so ordinary and so glamorous. And it’s four decades since David Bowie – wearing a lot of make-up and very few clothes, grinning through his pointy ...”

“... Grit and Glamour of an Icon’. She has interviewed more than 250 people, starting with the late John Warner (Taylor’s penultimate husband, a Republican senator) and her book reads like an extended feature for Vanity Fair. We learn that Bob Dylan adored her in Raintree County and that David Lynch kissed her after the 1987 Oscars (she was a fan of Blue ...”

“... acts of barter, to modern market economies in which money reaches everywhere and exchange knows no bounds. Free markets dissolve traditional social structures by encouraging everyone to enrich themselves through trade, but instead of unleashing mere anarchy – as most socialists seemed to think – they bring about a new kind of social order: a ‘division ...”

“... enlisted in the revolution of ‘total serialism’, repudiating diatonic music, Messiaen saw no reason to limit his options in the name of musical progress. He didn’t believe in progress; he believed in God. ‘Although he was certainly a towering figure in the history of 20th-century music, he was not of it,’ Taruskin wrote. ‘In a peculiar way the ...”

“... Hawksmoor the novel and Dickens the life. Peter was surely joshing her when he said that he was no initiate, had no knowledge of, or interest in, magical systems. He was the pivot, the man who had, single-handedly, made the arcane popular. A trip through the States visiting the Beat gerontocracy, the survivors, had ...”