“... Michael Polanyi, Paul Ricoeur, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Bruno Latour, Stephen Best, Toril Moi, Hal Foster, Namwali Serpell and others. Her current work is perhaps the liveliest and least plangent forum for questions about how to read and write criticism after theory. But read in isolation from this larger and longer conversation, it can look precariously open ...”

“... Edward Diestelkamp in giving equal credit for the building’s structure to the ironfounder Richard Turner as to its architect, Decimus Burton. The lives of the building’s inhabitants – plant and human – are glimpsed in short but informative chapters which describe the inception of the idea for such a building, its design, manufacture and ...”

“... in the popular audience perhaps played a part in the failure of the 18th-century academies to foster painting of this sort, although I know of only one contemporary commentator who even hinted that the prospects of high art might be in any way connected with the priorities of evangelism. This was Horace Walpole, who whimsically hoped that the Methodists ...”

“... He had earlier been associated with the Capricorn Africa Society, a utopian project designed to foster a common patriotism among black and white in East and Central Africa, but this had ‘sunk quietly into the sand’. In 1970 he was persuaded to drop a plan to raid Gaddafi’s jails and free political prisoners. Perhaps he should have been induced to ...”

“... it, to discover beneath its apparent unity the actual, irreducible forces that comprise it. What Richard Rorty called the ‘linguistic turn’ in philosophy, which was repealed subsequently in literary theory, was driven by the conviction that the only thing real in the subject was language, and that the only way for humanists to compete with scientists was ...”

“... but able to accommodate Robert (son of Edwin) Lutyens’s stores for Marks and Spencer as well as Richard Neutra’s blonde American beach houses. Hilaire Belloc, Evelyn Waugh, Cyril Connolly, Freya Stark, even Penelope Chetwode (Mrs Betjeman) shared the pages with respected authorities on building materials, the English town (‘one must not be too gay or ...”

“... away in the US, in his first year of teaching at Yale (his students the following year included Richard and Su Rogers and Norman Foster), and there were no faxes or e-mails to facilitate long-distance exchanges. Yet the scintillating design, finalised late in 1960, was, according to the client, Edward Parkes, very much a ...”

“... significance simply in terms of the magnitude of what was happening. The African-American writer Richard Wright reported: I’d no sooner climbed into the press gallery and looked down upon the vast assembly of delegates, many of them clad in their exotic national costumes, than I could sense an important junction of history in the making. In the early and ...”

“... It was Richard Crossman who described secrecy as ‘the British disease’. As with other alleged vices anglais – strikes, spanking and sodomy spring to mind – this seems on the surface to be unfair. Other societies have undoubtedly been as secretive. Soviet Russia, for example: I don’t suppose it was any easier to see your medical records there than it is here ...”

“... down in the light of broad day. His assassin was murdered on camera while in maximum security. Richard Nixon’s intimates fed high-denomination dollar bills into a shredder in order to disguise their provenance in the empire of – Howard Hughes? Marilyn Monroe fucked both Kennedy brothers before taking her own life, if she did indeed take it. Frank ...”

“... Dealer. The man who started this frivolous auction was William Safire, former speechwriter to Richard Nixon and now columnist for the New York Times. He it was who, during the dismal days of the Jimmy Carter Presidency, came up with ‘Koreagate’, ‘Peanutgate’, ‘Billygate’ and – his own favourite, concerning some fiddle of government expenses ...”

“... Mary given as parents), and of her death there in 1820. She had been left in Naples in the care of foster parents. Since the child was not in fact Mary’s, and since Shelley had kept certain correspondence about her secret from his wife, it seemed reasonable to conclude that Elise’s claim that Claire and Shelley had been lovers, and that Claire had given ...”

“... academic artist or the normal scientist, who embodies the virtues which she hopes her society will foster. There are many objections to what I have been saying, but the one which I find most disturbing says that I am treating democratic societies as existing for the sake of intellectuals. I seem to be describing institutions which were constructed in order to ...”

“... much ridicule and hostility. Popularisation may not always have meant democratisation, but it did foster an enduring enmity between evangelical religion and high culture. In the 20th century, the dispute has focused on the sciences. This is a curious development, for there seems to be no reason why Christians should find Darwin unassimilable, and studies show ...”

“... sensibility, they’re caught in the crossfire of the intergenerational squabble that caused David Foster Wallace, speaking for ‘the children of all the impassioned infidelities and divorces Updike wrote about so beautifully’, to characterise the typical Updikean baby boomer as ‘an asshole’. Gates’s men are often assholes, no question, but in place ...”