“... Indo-European linguistics and Ernest Gellner’s essay on Bronislaw Malinowski; then back to John Anderson – the 1938 editor of Tacitus – as a prelude to the vital (yet en passant) observation that ‘the history of modern ethnology is inseparable from that of nationalism’; and so to Franz Boas, antiquarianism, assorted reflections on L’Esprit ...”

“... to become an idea, in turn to be pursued by renewed introspection’. The process results in a hall-of-mirrors effect. Spontaneity is lost and disorganisation and fragmentation follow. What is called reality becomes alien and frightening. There are a number of paradoxes here, especially for the writer. All-powerful creator, he is himself a literary ...”

“... that a fair number of Gould’s contemporaries-Vladimir Horowitz, Gary Grafman, Leon Fleisher, John Ogdon, to mention a few of the most gifted – succumbed to mysterious illnesses and had to curtail appearances and whole careers. The extremity of being out there alone, day after day, sooner or later catches up with one, especially if, as in Gould’s ...”

“... Hugh had stuffed them with insurance policies. Some days the women went down to the Burgh Court Hall with their babes in arms. The municipal buildings. Everything smelled of wood waxing. A nervous succession of tenants would rise before the Baillie. ‘Why do you not pay your rent?’ ‘My man’s at the Front. No money. The wean’s sick. A don’t have ...”

“... memoir. ‘Long black carpets, extending from the street to the entrance of the exhibition hall, bore the emblem of the show,’ he writes: ‘a “No U-Turn” traffic sign signalling there is “no turning back”.’ Rumour had it that a wealthy expatriate Chinese collector wanted to buy up the whole thing and restage it abroad. China had been off ...”

“... her life. Dogville is structured in chapters, like Breaking the Waves, but also has a narrator (John Hurt) who supplies a mocking commentary on the town and its hypocrisies. Grace is found by an aspiring young writer called Tom (Paul Bettany), who is engaged in an inquiry into Moral Rearmament. Tom believes that the people of Dogville have no sense of ...”

“... by another tribunal, set up to inquire into the crude allegations of the gutter press after a spy, John Vassal, had been discovered in the Admiralty. Vassal, a homosexual who had worked in the private office of a junior minister, Tam Galbraith, had been blackmailed by the Russians into giving them information. Galbraith, who offered his resignation, which the ...”

“... in America had the desired effect. Positive reviews appeared in the French press, and, from John Stuart Mill, in the London Review. The doors to Parisian salons were now open, but Tocqueville soon found himself exhausted by the engagements of literary society, which he considered a distraction from his political and philosophical ambitions. A first ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... on to accuse the English of betraying their precious inheritance. The rot began, he said, with John Stuart Mill, who started off as a liberal but went on to swallow a toxic draught of German metaphysics and then succumbed to the feminist wiles of Harriet Taylor, who married him and led him astray. Under Taylor’s tutelage, it seems, Mill ‘slid slowly ...”

“... came across: much of Hunky Dory consists of pastiches of Bowie’s musical heroes of the 1960s – John Lennon, Syd Barrett, Anthony Newley, Bob Dylan, the Velvet Underground. Which would make Ziggy Stardust the beautiful butterfly that emerged from the chrysalis. Paul Trynka begins his biography with a description of Bowie’s performance of ‘Starman’ on ...”

“... the ostentatious solemnity one finds in the liturgical minimalism of composers like Arvo Pärt and John Tavener. The Messiaen ‘cathedral’, if not exactly ecumenical, is vast, with plenty of room in the nave – as Edward Said noted – for ‘staunch secularists like myself’. The sixth movement of Vingt Regards, a turbulent fugue, is called ‘Par Lui ...”

“... caught any of Alan Bennett’s Westminster Abbey footage? Bennett, required to audition for the John Betjeman slot, couldn’t bring himself to deliver much more than formulaic world-weariness, a drone like a miraculously articulate David Hockney impersonator. Jonathan Meades does this schtick so much better, performs himself with lip-smacking ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... had another connection to Jane Elgee before her marriage. In a letter to his son William in 1921, John Butler Yeats wrote of Jane Wilde: ‘When she was Miss Elgee, Mrs Butt found her with her husband when the circumstances were not doubtful, and told my mother about it.’ Butt enjoyed various romances, and was, on occasion, heckled at public meetings by the ...”