“... so lavishly did. But the Victorian and bourgeois attitudes can hardly be recaptured, except by means of nostalgic reconstruction. Self-consciousness has eaten too many of Eve’s, or Freud’s, apples. When an ardent feminist writes shamefacedly to the agony aunt of a woman’s magazine confessing that she has private fantasies of being sexually dominated ...”

“... that’s no bad thing: her blend of crackling violence and surreal wit often seems closer to David Lynch than Aquinas.The theological approach receives a predictably complete expression in Christine Flanagan’s edition of The Letters of Flannery O’Connor and Caroline Gordon. The two women were introduced by Robert Lowell, who had met O’Connor at ...”

“... which carries with it a sense of tenacity, the refusal to panic in trying circumstances. It means taking risks and having a lark but not making a fuss about it. Other than the earthquake incident, Hosking’s other salient memory of her three years in Africa was the time she saved Mary from a snake, catching it by the tail and pretending not to be ...”

“... the Platonic formula: ‘To know something is …’ Is knowledge true belief acquired by reliable means? Is it truth that one can justify to oneself? Is it something else altogether? There is nothing radically new in such philosophers’ methodology. They still test their answers against hypothetical cases. When Plato asks, in the Republic, whether justice is ...”

“... pathetic. Both were inept with money, and Gousha, especially, thought nothing of living beyond his means. In 1958, he was ‘retired’ from his advertising job, and shortly thereafter he and Powell were evicted from 35 West 9th Street for non-payment of rent: their possessions were actually thrown out on the street. By then, Powell was 61 and had completed ...”

“... or of future public borrowing is like building a house on ectoplasm. Thus Marcus Miller, by no means unsympathetic to monetarist economics, goes so far as to describe M3 as a ‘relatively meaningless monetary aggregate’. And, lest proponents of pecuniary discipline shake off that comment by observing the more recent significance of the fine tuning of ...”

“... Neville Brody is advertised as the most influential graphic designer of his generation, which means something in a Britain where we have at last found what we are really good at: charming money out of each other. If appetites are not refreshed, the clothes racked in Next and the produce tumbling from supermarket horns of plenty will be food for the moth and the worm ...”

“... such things are vieux jeu. From today’s austere perspective of urban history, culture means a way of life, and the arts are bidden to the feast only to strum background music and interpret or ‘represent’ the city. The various sub-disciplines of political economy have broadened and democratised our understanding of cities over the past forty ...”

“... Milton, poetic creativity is hallucination; Milton ushers in the age of delirium. What Teskey means by this opposition is best explained by recourse to the etymology of delirium. Delirus (‘crazy’) is a ploughing metaphor: a lira in Latin is the edge of earth thrown up by the plough that shows where to plough the next furrow; to be delirious is to ...”

“... of Communists, The Manchurian Candidate is not a properly political film. In it, being a Communist means having thick moustaches and tinted monocles and prancing about in a Sino-Soviet spectacle designed as if Rodchenko were in exile in Hollywood and working for Busby Berkeley. Being an anti-Communist means wearing a ...”

“... Dubai have all become safe havens for yachts designated by the US as ‘blocked property’. This means that they can’t use US-owned maintenance businesses, employ US crews or conduct their business in dollars.Impounding superyachts has caused the US some headaches. In February, Reuters reported that the Amadea, a seized yacht allegedly belonging to ...”

“... chaplain, no less); John Hull the piper with Alison, a blood relative of his former wife; David Webbe with Eve Elvell. Most of them were reported to be ‘outside’ the parish; that is, beyond the reach of the bishop’s crozier. But one more thing, reverend father: ‘John, chaplain, as it seems to them, is not firm in his faith, because he has ...”

“... in a delicate copperplate hand, ‘The daughter of Admiral Walker’, followed by a signature: ‘David Wilkie f-t 1840’. Near her there used to hang another portrait, of a fantastical fellow in a high tarbush with a long, dangling plume, his chest puffed out in his dress uniform, with prominent epaulettes, medals at his throat and a long scimitar cradled ...”

“... list of slavering lunatics beside the others with horrible designs on toddlers. There seemed no means of removing him from the police list, and he, like all the others, received a visit from the police in the little pink-fronted terraced house in Drewsteignton with a rainbow sticker in the window where he lived with the same bricklayer, now in his ...”

“... writer Philip Coggan, and in Debt: The First 5000 Years by the anthropologist and activist David Graeber, which situates the same stretch of modern history within the vast tidal shifts, across five millennia of Eurasian history, between monetary regimes founded on precious metals and those based on ‘virtual credit money’. In August 1971, Nixon ...”