“... by The Castoriadis Reader, edited by David Ames Curtis, Castoriadis’s major expositor in the English-speaking world: a festschrift edited by Curtis appeared last May as an issue of the journal, Thesis Eleven, which has been a major platform for Castoriadis’s ideas. In later life, Castoriadis wandered from Trotskyism into the ‘bourgeois ...”

“... The Usual Suspects, Thirty Two Short Films about Glenn Gould), and a few others (Nil by Mouth, The English Patient, The Truman Show, Shallow Grave) that someone might feel it was worth crossing the road for; but in general his argument that Lane’s evident talent has had little to work on and is condemned to dissipate itself in being wickedly witty about ...”

“... the tongue: Jean-Noël Vuarnet, Sylviane Agacinski, Jim West, Mary McCarthy, Gregory Mazurovsky, Richard Foreman, Kate Manheim, Louis and Zuka Mittelberg, Bruno Marcenac, Michel Loriod, Maurice Roche), he now can see that all the high-flown references he had barely understood – to Barthes, Foucault, Derrida, Lacan – were no more than intellectualising ...”

“... at Windsor. A rather bizarre legacy funded seven ‘superannuated or disabled lieutenants of English men of war’ to pray daily in the stalls for the souls of dead royalty and the reigning sovereign. Aside from that, they were expected, required even, to do nothing. It looked like the perfect solution for Holman to live a quietly crippled life. He was ...”

“... at Goldsmiths added to this sometimes rather austere cleverness the sparkle of his teacher Richard Wentworth’s playfulness (Hirst’s hairdryer and ping pong ball from 1994, called What Goes Up Must Come Down, has the punning neatness of Wentworth’s work). The English comedy of early Gilbert & George and a ...”

“... school in Pennsylvania, where he made friends with the son of Oscar Hammerstein, the lyricist for Richard Rodgers. (The young Sondheim went to see their pioneering show Oklahoma! when it opened in 1943.) Hammerstein recognised Sondheim’s talent, began to educate him in musical theatre and became a father-figure. It comes as a modest surprise now when ...”

“... embodying a design in brick, stone, steel – takes on its proper importance. In the heroic age of English engineering, engineer-contractors like the Stephensons dominate. Professional institutions have encouraged their members to keep the commercial side of building at a distance. Architects had little trouble staying in line; the Perrets (there were three ...”

“... respectable matron, favoured member of Swift’s literary circle (he taught her the good use of English by pinching her black and blue when she misspoke), Grub Street hack and ghostwriter for hire who figuratively hung out her sign – a literary version of Aphra Behn’s courtesan Angellica – across the street from that famous haunt of ‘titled drunks ...”

“... Quote me some. Oh I see. You can’t.     No answer: only the extreme hooded-eye treatment. Richard Avedon would need a studio’s worth of lights and reflectors to rig up this expression on an unsuspecting Salman. At the moment, though, a passing waiter with an Instamatic could have easily bettered it. Nobody spoke. Not even Christopher Hitchens. And I ...”

“... street was demolished in 1971, but you can see it clearly in the film 10 Rillington Place starring Richard Attenborough and John Hurt, filmed on location shortly before demolition. The houses had bay windows going all the way down to the ground, and no front steps or front gardens. Number 10 was the last house on the left, jammed up against the wall of a ...”

“... the Christmas season with murder plays, mostly dramatised detective stories from the classic English phase of the 1920s and 1930s. This joining of the festive with the lethal provokes thought. There may well be some long line in English culture that links the Christmas visit to The Mousetrap with a point at least as ...”

“... as builders of temples of high culture. An authorised biography has now appeared of an English dealer of recent memory, Robert Fraser, 1937-86. His chequered career, terminated by Aids, lasted as long as it did only because of subsidies from his parents and getting away with not paying his debts, while the world at large remembers him for pictures ...”

“... the tradition by issuing one counterfeit version after another of events in Kosovo. Since Richard Holbrooke, Washington’s Balkan fixer, brokered a rickety ceasefire last October, Milutinovic’s arguments have come with a plausible lustre – he invokes the UN Charter, the sovereignty of member states and so on – but his latest observation, that ...”

“... Berg thus prepares the ground for her comment that it was not a big step for Marx then to take English radicalism and Engels to their limits, and concludes her book by quoting this passage from Marx: ‘Forces of production and social relations – two different sides of the development of the social individual – appear to capital as mere means, and are ...”

“... that one has AIDS may not lead to restraint: on the contrary, some AIDS patients, according to Richard Fisher, have described becoming reckless, through despair and a sense that there was now little to lose. ‘They throw themselves into sex,’ as he puts it, ‘in every bar, bath and cottage.’ The role of these bath-houses has been crucial in the ...”