“... is easy to come by: the author of ‘Last Instructions to a Painter’ is also the author of ‘To Richard Lovelace’, and of the vitriolic assault on the literary reputation of Tom May. Even by itself, the Horatian Ode is not easy to read: why, for example, did he hope Cromwell would be ‘to Italy an Hannibal’? Hannibal ...”

“... totally eclipsed by Cagney and co as gangster films hit their stride. Of a child-star called Baby Richard Headrick: dunked in a fountain thirty times in an afternoon, shivering and fighting back tears, and with his father standing guard. Schulberg’s detached yet sympathetic gaze seems to have been sharply focused almost since birth, and behind many episodes ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... father had seven donkeys and a camel and many goats. Therefore we were rich, yet I could not read, nor could my parents.’ The finale of his show is a slide which shows ‘tribespeople dancing, made happy by literacy’. Then there is the hotel – in this case it is the Cyrus – with a ‘Western-style bar where people hung out like expatriates in a ...”

“... potential relevance to society. In an astonishingly short-time, scientists have learned to read the billions-long sequences of molecules that comprise DNA, have described in great detail its basic functioning, and have discerned connections between defects in the DNA and disease. Radical transformations of the practices of medicine and law ...”

“... This book is a cry of pure pain, immensely difficult to read without groaning and sometimes weeping and getting up to pace the floor. Its flavour is aptly illustrated by the shocking jacket photograph of Nijinsky undergoing a catatonic seizure at the age of 37, about eight years after he wrote this text. With his necktie neatly knotted, his face shaven and his hair combed, hands curled up, the greatest dancer of his epoch – some say of any epoch – stares into the lens with a horrifying sacrificial patience ...”

“... the sale of arms to Iraq. These characters have no redeeming features, and it’s a pleasure to read about them. ‘He would take full advantage of his freedom from party loyalties,’ we read of the politician, ‘by slavishly toeing the line of whichever cynical new shift in policy the present administration happened to ...”

“... who had played a small part in the early skirmishes between Ancients and Moderns in his attacks on Richard Bentley in the 1700s (he described Bentley as ‘a man of fair diligence in turning the pages of dictionaries’), was always going to be watching his feet. In the early decades of the 18th century Neo-Latin poets tried to sound as Latin and as un-Neo as ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”