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“... 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 ...”

“... and his despising of the entire world that had produced the Douglases. Wilde left himself in no doubt about what he thought of Douglas’s family, or of the hospitality Douglas’s mother had offered, what he called ‘the cold cheap wine of Salisbury’. He resented being used as a pawn in the game between father and son: ‘I had something better to do ...”

“... people said about her: she was dirty, a thief, shy, different, an aspiring poet, ‘a lovely girl, no trouble at all’, officially insane, ‘pleasant to the guests at all times’, the ‘niece who is going overseas’, the grande dame of New Zealand letters. She remembered her clothes as if they were costumes: a dreaded ‘grey serge tunic’ at school, a ...”

“... him are scarce. My grandmother, whose only brother he was, has been dead now for twenty years. No one else who knew him is still alive. By stringing together odd comments from family members I’ve learned that he worked as a greengrocer’s boy in Derby before joining up in 1915; that he served first in the Sherwood Foresters; that he managed to survive ...”

“... Victorian charwoman’.His name is not much known this side of the Channel, where there is as yet no biography of him or translation of his works. (A long-awaited life is in preparation by the leading Anglophone Cravaniste, Roger Lloyd Conover.) This lacuna is curious because although Cravan was Swiss by birth, and wrote exclusively in French, he was a mix of ...”

“... posthumous A Writer’s Diary, he laments: ‘The beauties the beauties the things I let go by.’ No one should approach Forster’s diaries, now published in full for the first time, with any expectation of the riches of Woolf’s. For Forster the diary was of far more spasmodic usefulness, and for long stretches of his long and oddly shaped life might well ...”

“... the architectural history of various subway systems and the theory of names as it developed from John Stuart Mill to Saul Kripke, with, by way of comparison, a solid account of necronym taboos among various tribes. Films, photographs and museum exhibits are everywhere used in evidence, as is an enormous range of recondite archival material. As the founder ...”

“... not on local but on state and national issues, as the pro-gun and pro-life candidate. Mayors have no say on abortion or on gun laws, but Palin got the support of the local Evangelicals (it greatly helped that her – Lutheran – opponent’s surname was Stein and her backers put it about that he was a Jew) and of gun-owners who keenly supported a bill, then ...”

“... most famous old boy from the days before Independence and his portrait hung in the school hall. I ate and drank with Russell for five years, often wondering what he was for and how on earth he had got to where he had from our common starting point in a Dublin suburb. Russell’s reputation was made by his brilliant defence of the Irish Nationalist MP ...”