“... comparison with Beckett would be neither irrelevant nor absurd. The French novelist and playwright Robert Pinget was put forward in the 1960s as an exponent of the ‘nouveau roman’. But his affiliation with Beckett was always stronger than the temporary association with Robbe-Grillet’s travelling circus, and Beckett paid him the compliment of making an ...”

“... the most memorable creations in his gallery of bien-pensant absurdity was the trendy filmmaker and self-publicist Neville Dreadberg, whose documentary Blood Orange was imagined as depicting the cannibalistic practices of rank and file Ulster Unionists. In a variant on the traditional Ulster fry-up – and Swift’s Modest Proposal – Wharton described ...”

“... tries to be bubbly about its degeneracy, but it’s mostly just a jokeless, pulpless exercise in self-abuse. Of course it tends to like lagers and motors, fighting and hooligans, and imagines the rest of the world is fraudulent and missing out because it has other things on its mind. What’s sad about the magazine is that, despite its defensive bluster, it ...”

“... of two and lived with a succession of relatives; at the age of five he went to boarding-school. Robert McCrum calculates that ‘in total, Wodehouse saw his parents for barely six months between the ages of three and 15.’ After he left Dulwich College, to which he remained deeply attached for the rest of his life, his father got him a job at the Hong Kong ...”

“... Gay and Arbuthnot. Thomson’s Seasons. For theology he went to Hooker, Tillotson, William Law and Robert South. For technical and ‘philosophic’ (i.e. scientific) expressions he went to John Ray’s Wisdom of God in the Creation, Grew’s Cosmologia Sacra, William Derham’s Physico-Theology, Thomas Burnett’s Theory of the Earth, Richard Bentley’s ...”

“... that he had betrayed Sam. And fear of appearing ridiculous. He might act the fool but that was a self-protective game: you shout loudest what you fear most. Perhaps, in the end, that was the real truth of it. He had preferred to shelter behind the lie of this oldest taboo, rather than commit himself to his folly; jump with both feet into the deep end of an ...”

“... on the Stanford Humanities core-curriculum. Nevertheless, for all his zest in being his successful self, one guesses that he feels fenced in. More particularly, he evidently has mixed feelings about his loyal public, with their insatiable demand for more of the same. He has, for all his energy and versatility, become a franchised product and he doesn’t like ...”

“... described in the memoir began in 1888, when the Yeats family were living in Bedford Park, a self-contained, rather bohemian artists’ community, between Hammersmith and Acton in West London. William was 23, Susan Yeats (or Lily, as she was known within the family) was 22, Elizabeth (Lolly) 20. Their father, who had given up the law shortly after he ...”

“... supposed threat to traditional religion. What made it different was the leadership of the lawyer Robert Aske, leadership of a kind which had been lacking in Lincolnshire. For Aske had charisma and, it appears, boundless personal ambition. It was Aske who invented the logo ‘Pilgrimage of Grace’, declaring himself ‘chief captain’ of the Pilgrimage, and ...”

“... a bit ‘like a jockey’. But everybody noticed that Nijinsky had a supernatural-seeming gift for self-transformation. It was a gift so extreme it had always seemed capable of unbalancing his mind. While watching him in Le Spectre de la rose, Cocteau remarked that Nijinsky was like ‘some melancholy, imperious scent’, that ‘evaporates through the window ...”

“... to say that Hunt didn’t possess his own kind of vanity, ‘a little over-bearing, over-weening self-complacency’, as Hazlitt described it. When he and his brother John were sentenced to two years’ imprisonment in 1812 for libelling the Prince Regent, Hunt offered a teasingly serene, not to say Skimpolean face to the public: ‘Our Prosecutors will ...”

“... the 20th century. Both fled their home cities as children to escape racial violence: Gordon, the Robert Charles riots of 1900, in which a mob of white Southerners murdered dozens after an African American man shot a police officer who had asked what he was doing in a mainly white neighbourhood; Croll, the Odessa pogrom of 1905, in which more than four ...”

“... an ironmonger to cast it and an artilleryman to load, point and fire it.’Since laws are not self-executing, one concern is that the ideal of the rule of law becomes the rule of those empowered to enforce the law. This worry – usually attributed to Thomas Hobbes, but it too can be traced back at least as far as Aristotle – is often expressed in ...”

“... we have no right’. Mindful of the ancient Greek fable about ‘the bird in borrowed feathers’, Robert Greene dismissed William Shakespeare in 1592 as that ‘upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers’ who dared to mingle among London’s established writers. Meanwhile, in English markets, items misleadingly claiming to be made entirely from desirable ...”

“... years shows. This journal, judiciously quoted in his memoir Rebecca’s Vest, had some of the self-arraigning qualities of old Presbyterian spiritual diaries and some Romantic young Werther posing, but disciplined by a vigilant sense of irony about his own emotions. Later in his life, he was to defend intelligent ...”