“... through Christopher Hughes’s Kripke: Names, Necessity and Identity, I am no longer puzzled. That may sound as though I’m intending to dispraise the book, but to the contrary; I think it’s a fine piece of work in lots of ways. To begin with, the topic is well chosen. By pretty general consent, Kripke’s writings (including, especially, Naming and ...”

“... a collection of M-O ‘day reports’ on George VI’s coronation, published under the title May the Twelfth, he was sure it marked the beginning of an entirely new form of literature. He thought of the methods of Mass-Observation less as sociology than as a kind of poetry, one which, in Roland Penrose’s words, paid particular attention to ‘what was ...”

“... as long as I did not feel my conscience quite at rest’. The famous opening of Fingal’s Cave may have been jotted down when Mendelssohn visited the place, but it took years of tweaking before the score was given to the world, and the same is true of the fabulously fluent Fair Melusine Overture, the volatile (posthumously ...”

“... one night, you said.’ ‘Yes.’ ‘All right, but if I start this story …’ ‘Yes?’ ‘It may change under my hands.’ … ‘So what shall I wear?’ ‘It’s up to you. Combat or Prada?’ ‘How much can I spend on clothes?’ ‘How about $1000?’ ‘My whole wardrobe or just one outfit?’ And so on. I don’t know why Winterson put that bit ...”

“... not prejudice, to Oliver Yorke, with a reply from Oliver Yorke’ (published in the magazine in May 1831) is a good example, though the actual authorship of the piece remains unknown. Another Irish journalist, Sylvester Mahony (‘Father Prout’), contributed a series of ‘Prout papers’ to Fraser’s and when these Reliques of Father Prout were ...”

“... and hold our empire by the tenure of the sword. For this neither the nation, nor individuals, may be in strict propriety responsible, because the current of events, and not their own ambitious plans, swept the India Company onwards to the position which they now hold; yet the facts are as I have stated them to be, and we cannot escape from them. Indeed we ...”

“... on their own to make a children’s story – which, to give Hooper the benefit of the doubt, may be the point. ‘A child’s book of true crime’ is oxymoronic. The closest approximation to such a thing may, in fact, be Veronica Marne’s Murder at Black Swan Point. When Spufford ‘ventured out among the modern ...”

“... of the drive.I remember thinking: alive or dead, a rat wasa god-forsaken thing,But at least, in May, that even a rat should be alive.Sydney, however, could not cajole her. It was not the moment for a nice luncheon, or a Charlie Chaplin film, or even Mudie’s. With a timetable even more strict than usual, he had to catch the 4.30 to Dorchester, where ...”

“... Berlin almost five months later. Readers of Beevor’s Stalingrad will draw comparisons, and it may be that they will find this at once a longer view and a less satisfying work. Stalingrad’s limitation was its astonishing, deliberate lack of historical context; this was the closely retrieved story of a great battle whose ...”

“... content. Insofar as form and language detain him, they detain him as questions of ideology. It may be for this reason that he seems to prefer drama to poetry and fiction, and that he praises ‘the particularly rapid progress of English drama’ in this period. (Drama, being more openly political than either fiction or poetry, is more progressive.) Just as ...”

“... The prodigiously gifted artist and writer Joe Brainard died of Aids in a hospital in New York in May 1994, at the age of 52. He had long been revered in certain parts of the New York art and poetry worlds, though he never achieved, or, by all accounts, desired, the celebrity and status of Andy Warhol or Claes Oldenburg or Jim Dine, alongside whose work his elegant collages were first presented to British gallery-goers at the Hayward’s Pop Art show of 1969 ...”

“... psychological reading obscures the larger ideological issues embedded in the narratives, and which may indeed be their main point. He notes, but is uninterested in, the fact that many scholars believe Perpetua’s prison diary emanated from the ‘New Prophecy’ or Montanist movement, which the mainstream church was soon to reject as heretical. Montanists ...”

“... in Russia. The local rouble’s value is pegged higher than Russia’s.) The delays and fees may deter some traffic, but the open border at least keeps contact alive. On the outskirts of Tiraspol, the secessionist territory’s capital, we passed a huge stadium, hotel and sports complex built by Transdniestria’s richest man, Viktor Gushan, who calls ...”

“... for us, English. We started a day early; originally, we had planned to arrive in Cachora on 27 May, but all the roads would be closed that day because of a national strike called in protest at government plans to privatise public resources, including water. (Remember, we are telling what we were told.) A couple of days later, we heard on Cecilia’s ...”

“... electronic music in particular. ‘Only through the use of electrical means,’ he writes, ‘may important advances in the exploration of sound be made’: ‘American music will be enlivened and enriched by such exploration and use of new musical materials. These can best be brought about through the co-operation of scientists with a real appreciation ...”