“... discuss the unreliable, energy-sapping machines that can be seen on city streets today. There may be almost a billion bicycles in the world (by Herlihy’s estimate), but many of their owners have yet to discover the pleasures of cycling. This sunny view of bicycling history makes it easy to imagine those blissful days of well-designed bike paths and ...”

“... 20th century. Some essential facts are also disclosed. Her ‘impending and unwelcome birth’ in May 1911 caused her parents – her English mother and German father – to travel from Spain, where she was conceived, to Charlottenburg, Berlin. If the fact of her arrival displeased her parents, its location in a ‘country of which I would have liked to know ...”

“... acceptable. I owe this information, let me say, not to any of my law books but to E.S. Turner’s May It Please Your Lordship, a repository of those bits of legal history which remind me of what Jack Hendy, a law lecturer who started life as a jobbing electrician, once said he had found in both trades: that the most useful thing you could have with you was a ...”

“... She knew you were lying and sleeping around. Ray please I never lied to her. When need arose I may have used words that lied. Way too philosophical for me. Philosophers say man forms himself in dialogue. That I understand. So did she. Now there you’re wrong. Why do you say so. I saw her go down. She was far stronger than me. She went down. Everything I ...”

“... not you know my circumstances, you would not treat me thus.’ Chatterton’s most astute readers may then have been the 18th-century philologists rather than the Romantic poets, despite the emphasis in the title of this book. Probably the best Romantic summary of Chatterton’s career is Wordsworth’s, because he skirts the issues of poverty and obscurity ...”

“... in bed waiting for the statement. Bush said that there had been an apparent act of terrorism. He may have said more. The only other thing I remember him saying was ‘God bless America.’ I live downtown and decided that I should go take a look. On the way I stopped and bought a cup of coffee. I reached Broadway and couldn’t see the towers so I headed ...”

“... of purpose. Such books were not always very attractive or even very interesting, though we may learn to miss them just because their elevation already seems old-fashioned. Last year, the prize’s new sponsors let it be known that it was time for a shiny new populism, and so far the judges have concurred. Neither prize-winner, under the new regime, has ...”

“... likes lying inside his sleeping bag and how he likes to eat cheese grated with his own grater, but may not excuse confessions such as ‘I also love leaping around the furniture. I like to do this approximately every half hour, or even every fifteen minutes if I can manage it. I also enjoy making noises like “Zzzhhh Zzzhhh” quite a lot.’ Christopher ...”

“... the visible exits, so they had to conclude that this was the end of that particular route. There may be other ways to penetrate still lower in the Arabika. For the time being, however, the Ukrainian cavers are concentrating on a new possibility, in the Aladaglar massif in the Taurus Mountains of eastern Turkey. A difficult, even dangerous place, either above ...”

“... Radio’. (Bambi: ‘Filth.’ Casablanca: ‘This movie is filth.’ Cat People: ‘A race may civilise itself by language, not film. Cat People is filth.’) At least Eggers and his associates seem to be having fun. And in You Shall Know Our Velocity, his first novel, he has some more. YSKOV – as it’s inevitably known – has abandoned most of the ...”

“... inexpressible’, ‘loftiest rhyme’ – which could be deliberate. But he does not note that we may also hear the general imitation of Wordsworth’s mode. Tennyson must have had in the back of his mind this, or some similar passage from Wordsworth: The picture of the mind revives again: While here I stand, not only with the sense Of present pleasure, but ...”

“... has projected its forces beyond its borders, in Darfur, CAR and Mali, only to discover that they may soon have to be deployed at ...”

“... take anything home … But the fffs are drawn out too richly to be explained by that alone. Vidal may fuck boys but by God he fffucks and Henry James did too. Vidal is not just convinced that James liked boys. He’s convinced he fucked them. Listening to this point hammered home the third time I thought how much this means to Vidal, and how perfectly his own ...”

“... the Thames. On the Hudson the new Whitney Museum, conceived by Renzo Piano, will open its doors in May. Guided by Diller Scofidio + Renfro, the Museum of Modern Art is planning another expansion (the last one was just ten years ago), and the Metropolitan Museum of Art will transform its modern wing by the end of the decade. I draw these examples from London ...”

“... painting of the moon in its successive movements, rising and falling over a polar landscape. That may have been a pure coincidence (nobody can remember) and in any case the piece advertised on the rubric – it was the first issue of 1997 – was Alan Bennett’s ‘What I did in 1996.’ One thing Bennett didn’t do was skate to ...”