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“... covertly in his Memoirs (1991), there’s a feeling that Larkin’s poems, splendid though they may be, are in need of corrective piss-taking and don’t carry the weight that ‘any novel does’. After his death, in 1995, Amis took less of a battering than Larkin had. Martin Amis’s Experience (2000) softened the prevailing image of him as the meanest ...”

“... but transformed them. Above all, it turned social markers into political ones. That is Richard Wrigley’s contention in his fascinating study of the changing meaning of appearances from 1789 to the Napoleonic period. Right from the start, as the Revolutionaries tried to create an entirely new society, the vestimentary symbols of the Old Regime ...”

“... leader ‘to arrest all’ who had known about an assassination plot, ‘as well as all those who may have taken part’. A semi-autobiographical work, Men and the City, evoked the grim world of his rural upbringing in Tikrit, calling it ‘worse than the life of dogs’.Still, he made it to high school and then law school in Baghdad, before being recruited ...”

“... as if subjecting the world to continual enquiry on this important issue. The sign ‘V’ may somehow hold together the dispersed elements of V, or it may not. The trajectory and the history of the V2 rockets in the seven-hundred-page fantasia of Gravity’s Rainbow promote, as ...”

“... assured I shall never demand it again, from any apprehension that hereafter the friendliness in it may be at variance with whatever feeling I please to entertain thirty years hence. Accordingly I set down with no sort of misgiving that I am, Dear Lady Olliffe, Yours very truly Robert Browning. This jeu d’esprit – which testifies nonetheless, in ...”

“... all be going to hell. That’ll answer them. Herbert has influenced poets from Henry Vaughan and Richard Crashaw to Dylan Thomas and Geoffrey Hill. And not only poets; reading Herbert has made converts, even in modern times. While reciting ‘Love (III)’, the famous last poem in The Temple, Simone Weil felt that ‘Christ himself descended and took ...”

“... be obliged to impose familiar patterns on the material, working according to inherited ideas which may well have eluded critical inspection. Only thus can he discern some sort of coherence in works that seem strange largely because they appear to have none. Historians are professionally prejudiced in favour of order; they cannot simply record chaos; sequences ...”

“... was born in 1900, and died in 1983. There can be argument over the exact date of its death. Some may maintain that it did not die until about 1990, others that electorally it died in 1980 or even earlier. There will be similar controversy over the role of Michael Foot: did he lead it to its death or did he just accompany it? Was he one of the physicians who ...”

“... that they’re growing. I think that they’re desperate.’ I heard about hope. I heard General Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, say: ‘I came away more positive than I’ve ever been. I think we’re getting some momentum built up.’ I heard about happiness. I heard Lieutenant General James Mattis say that ‘it’s a lot of fun to ...”

“... there is Oliver, his best friend but in many ways his opposite: louche, sexy, camp, cultured – Richard E. Grant to Stuart’s Paul McGann. Oliver teaches at an iffy language school off the Edgware Road. He is into opera, food, wine, the imperatives of good taste. He uses the word ‘crepuscular’ a lot, and speaks in a froth of polyglot ...”

“... of Archigram ideas in several buildings that have been made by [Norman] Foster and his friend Richard Rogers … it raises all those classic issues about origin, innovation and the ownership of ideas.’ Indeed. But then so too do the off-the-peg Victorian-medieval churches that constellate England.Archigram’s flaw was its timing. Founders seldom ...”

“... of atom bombs, magazine ads and cheesy bondage photos. Goodman’s poster for the Doom Show, which may have been the best thing in it, is at the Grey Art Gallery, spray-painted on a crumpled, fire-damaged edition of a daily newspaper. Lurie, a Latvian Jew and concentration camp survivor, made what he described as ‘no! art’. It has scarcely lost its power ...”

“... Baudelaire on Callot, Donald Hall on Munch, Hollander on Monet and dozens more, including Richard Wilbur’s exquisitely meditative imitation of a Baroque wall fountain, a poem that sounds more like the work of art it imitates than any other I know.* The painting of Howard Hodgkin is a first-rate example of the vivid muteness that resists critical ...”

“... Carel van Mander in 1603, the earliest account of Caravaggio’s art that is known to us, we may deduce that Caravaggio was the first European artist who ostentatiously disdained invention and the ideal. He adhered instead to an artistic purpose that can only be called realist with a defiance which anticipated the attitudes of those 19th-century painters ...”

“... The dispute is conducted in the languages of theology, jurisprudence, humanism and philosophy, and may be said to have been held together by a concept of ‘the political’ sufficiently coherent and idiosyncratically Latin and Western to raise the question whether ‘political thought’ can be held to exist in the culture of other civilisations without ...”