“... the work. This halt in the narrative of Priestley’s remarkable career invites comparison with Richard Holmes’s biography of Coleridge, which stopped just as his protagonist set sail in spring 1804 for Mediterranean exile, or with Janet Browne’s recent first volume of a large-scale life of Charles Darwin. Holmes asks what we might now think of ...”

“... have the bright idea of taking that pompous phrase literally and pretending that he and his foil, Richard Murdoch, were living in a flat at the top of Broadcasting House. For some reason this fancy captivated the nation, and from it developed a wonderful gallimaufry of imaginary characters – Lewis the Goat, Mrs Bagwash, her daughter Nausea. It established ...”

“... Kushner deploys the trick of humanising Romy for readers by making her too someone who likes to read. There are several unnecessary attempts to persuade us not only that Romy is smart, but also that the terms by which we might judge smarts (a salaried job, degrees) are mistaken. ‘Every stripper I know is clever,’ Romy says. ‘Some are practically ...”

“... Consider, before we turn to the main business, a sketch of his explanation of why a ‘meme’ (read ‘idea’ in English-language editions) can become widely accepted in a culture: It’s because the meme is beneficial. And to whom does the benefit accrue? Why, to the meme. ‘In the domain of memes, the ultimate beneficiary . . . is: the meme ...”

“... construction: a making of meaning from within a particular cultural moment rather than something read off from the way things really are. Vattimo knows that the most likely response to this nihilistic vision is despair: he sees its expression in the reflorescence of fundamentalist thinking – religious and nationalist – but also in the spread of purely ...”

“... with atheism, libertinism and violent revolution. Openly atheistic tracts by such agitators as Richard Carlile were sold under the counter and were often written from prison. As Secord observes, such works ‘had long been available to the wealthy and discreet, and were sold in much the same way (and sometimes through the same channels) as ...”

“... than the sun’s shafts seem to promise. What if the guide has lost his touch, can no longer read the entrails? Speer’s detachment and poised ambiguity were not entirely affectations. He was a provincial snob who regarded himself, with cause, as socially superior to Hitler, let alone such freakish botches of Aryan manhood as Himmler, Göring, Ley and ...”

“... world art’, but writing that tells you more than you can see for yourself and makes you want to read on is harder to come by. That is what Bell provides, with clarity and a wonderfully sustained faculty of response. A practical device he uses to carry you through is the long caption. He accepts that some readers will skim and dip; captions can offer a ...”

“... literary memory and even into living memory. But actually contemporary? It would be interesting to read an Ofsted report on a medieval school. For one thing, education in post-Roman times was essentially concerned with literacy and with Christianity, and at first very closely linked with monasticism. The aims of a monastic teacher dealing with a seven-year-old ...”

“... that when Sir Henry Wyatt, father of the poet Sir Thomas Wyatt, was imprisoned in the Tower by Richard III he was fed by a cat which brought him a dead pigeon. In Wolf Hall this piece of family mythology becomes a tale that Sir Henry, on the edge of retirement, relates himself, with a rheumy twinkle of unreliability in his eye. A factually implausible ...”

“... or monetary co-operation. In a cabinet meeting in February 1966 Wilson again denied the link, and Richard Crossman, the minister of housing, recorded in his diary that Wilson ‘repeated time after time that the Americans had never made any connection between the financial support they gave us and our support for them in Vietnam.’ The evidence confirms that ...”

“... constituted a growing proportion of the population and why the eminent Presbyterian Richard Baxter was convinced that a large proportion of those ‘born of Christian Parents’ had ‘banished’ faith from their ‘Hearts and Lives’. Often described as ‘worldlings’, these were people who denied God less in thoughts and words than in ...”

“... that relationships frequently traversed ethnic or linguistic divides. At Turnastone, a man called Richard Gogh was said to be consorting with various women: Helen, daughter of Trahaearn, and Lleucu, daughter of Einion, and Lleucu Kedy – all probably Welsh – but also with the more English-sounding Margaret Hunt. Another woman in the village, accused of ...”

“... because she is variously Toni Morrison, Cy Twombly, Susan Sontag, Cindy Sherman, Susan Howe, Richard Hell, Clarice Lispector, Bob Dylan and Edie Sedgwick. (Not an exhaustive list – and if it doesn’t cohere, well, the Zelig-like career of an artist like X isn’t meant to.) Not all the references to currently working writers in the footnotes seem ...”

“... the narrator, Eily, gets so anxious giving a blowjob that she makes her actor-boyfriend recite Richard III to get her through it:Nowisthewinterofourdiscontentmadeglorioussummerbythissonofyork and allthecloudsthatloured upon our house inthedeepbosomofthe ocean     burrrrieeeed nowareourbrowsboundwithvictoriouswreaths …Characters use their bodies to get ...”