“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... architects to think there was anything for them in new Tube stations besides the ‘fit-out’. As Richard MacCormac, whose firm has designed the new Southwark Station, put it: ‘the engineers design the system, then the architects dress it up. Was it just a matter of deciding which tiles to put on the platform walls?’ When Paoletti started looking for ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... questions that they askd was, when it would thunder. Joseph Banks, The ‘Endeavour’ Journal Richard Holmes describes The Age of Wonder as a ‘relay race of scientific stories’ about the explosion of exploration and scientific achievement in England between two celebrated voyages, Captain James Cook’s first circumnavigation of the world in the ...”

“... James Fox’s articles in the Sunday Times and the New Review saw in it the ‘whole waterlogged English class system’ sinking under its own weight. But the system has proved remarkably buoyant. Old Etonians and alumni of the Bullingdon Club continue to thrive. By contrast their antagonists of forty years ago, the police and the press, have fared less ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... an aura of wild improbability over even such presumably real events as a press reception for the English Country Cheese Council. Learning that George Best is for sale for £200,000, he toys with the idea of using a recent legacy to buy him as ‘a companion on my occasional visits to the night club scene of our metropolis’, but reflecting that Best has a ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... another occasion, however, Coward does admit it. In 1955 he writes: Another book I am reading is Richard Aldington’s blistering, debunking attack on Lawrence of Arabia. I do not care for Richard Aldington’s mind, and his malice is a little too apparent; nevertheless quite a lot of it ’ as far as I have read ...”