“... his skill at managing effects, and for the medium, then only about fifteen years old. The second self-portrait, one of the first photographs you encounter in the exhibition, is different and not. Fenton is half-seated on a table covered in a sheepskin rug and supporting a bottle of beer and a tankard; a rifle is cocked in his hands and pointed out to the ...”

“... symmetry, to 1984. The brother is romantically attached to the insurrectionary tradition of Robert Emmet, a tie which has left him and his sister on the margins of the new society. The balancing of hope and frailty at the mid-point of the century is masterly: ‘The past receded a little with the day; time yet unspent was left to happen as fearfully as ...”

“... Flora Drew’s translation of The Noodle Maker is more graceful than the original, lacking the self-conscious rudeness of the Chinese and the uneasy kinship with Maoist style. The Nobel citation in 2000 described Gao Xingjian’s novel One Man’s Bible as a book ‘settling the score with the terrifying insanity usually referred to as China’s Cultural ...”

“... determined to write Nivison out of the script, however. The show includes Hopper’s one mature self-portrait on canvas but omits its companion, Jo Painting (1936), which is also in the Whitney collection. In fact, Nivison has been all but expunged from the record as far as this exhibition and its catalogue are concerned. At the press preview, the show’s ...”

“... of ‘psychological’ explanations of social failure and contempt for those who ‘wallowed’ in self-analysis are wholly out of tune with the current explosion of ‘counselling’ (the fastest-growing of the new parapsychological professions). Her suggestion that in certain circumstances wage-reductions were a necessary tool of rational economic planning ...”

“... I’ve paid my dues.’ Jones just shook his head, as though amazed at the depth of our shared self-deception, and then said: ‘You people have fucked the whole thing up. When we get there we’re going to do things differently.’ I remember sitting there thinking, ‘He’s confusing class and race. To get “there” he has to become us, and us is not ...”

“... such bacilli existed. The epidemic had struck at a crucial juncture. Louis Pasteur in France and Robert Koch in Imperial Berlin had pioneered the germ theory of disease, which attributed lethal epidemics to invasive micro-organisms. But this new bacteriology did not enjoy an instantaneous or universal triumph. To many it seemed like a warmed-up version of ...”

“... reminder of primitive and innocent reading experiences. Something very similar was aimed at by Robert Louis Stevenson, and in Our Ancestors Calvino has a beautiful description of the Stevensonian romance: ‘To him, writing meant translating an invisible text containing the quintessential fascination of all adventures, all mysteries, all conflicts of will ...”

“... xxii, 1-2). We are well clear of Adam Smith by now, and still going strong, but the next hop, to Robert Lowe, marks the turn for home. For Lowe is introduced as a radical Utilitarian administrator (see Utilitarianism). Utilitarianism naturally leads us to Jeremy Bentham, and Bentham equally naturally back to Utilitarianism. This makes no difference ...”

“... not distinctly memorable, either for good qualities or bad. They are not posturing, or false, or self-indulgent, or vicious in language: but there is no particular reason why any of them should be read a second time. Why is it that his critical comments, especially the negative ones, stick so much more sharply in the memory? It is not that they are ...”

“... nation, they locate identity more in history or achievement than in biology or language. Colonel Robert Monro of Foulis, that old warrior of the Thirty Years’ War, said that the Hanseatic city of Stralsund was lucky to get a Scottish garrison and governor ‘of the onley Nation that was never conquered’. Nothing about the warlike qualities of Celts. And ...”

“... Thirty, Argo recounts an old secret mission in Iran. Is there a worry here? An act of national self-reassurance? An uneasy celebration of questionable moments? An easy celebration? Whatever the answers to these questions, they have nothing to do with Quentin Tarantino’s Django. This is a violent and lurid movie lover’s movie, alternating fluently ...”

“... can’t speak like gangsters in movies? The two American films made from the story, directed by Robert Siodmak and Don Siegel, in 1946 and 1964 respectively (now re-released together on DVD by the Criterion Collection), very wisely go one better than Hemingway in this matter. They leave the movie joke out. They are up to all kinds of things, but dizzying ...”

“... American but all of whom worked in the United States between 1930 (Jackson Pollock’s haunted self-portrait) and 1979 (Joan Mitchell’s joyful Salut Tom, which pulsates with fluid light). One might suppose that the very term ‘abstract expressionism’ – it was coined in 1946 by the art critic Robert Coates writing ...”

“... in 1980, mainly in a hippyish French Quarter teahouse called Until Waiting Fills (a line from Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land, or a variation on one), where the curtains were never opened. Neither book was so huge as to destabilise the whole experience of reading. Bottom’s Dream does that. I first saw the book on the Newly Arrived shelves ...”