“... in our house when I was a teenager and they both offered glimpses of the world outside that were more intense, more useful, than anything on television or on albums or in ordinary books. One was The Penguin Book of Contemporary Verse, edited by Kenneth Allott. It had been published first in 1950, with a second edition in ...”

“... on, and attribution of responsibility is still hotly contested. The conclusion, which becomes more troubling the more you think about it, is that nobody entirely understands the Flash Crash. The Flash Crash was the first moment in the spotlight for high-frequency trading. This new type of market activity had grown to ...”

“... Only a year ago, American evangelical Christians seemed more powerful than they had ever been. They had helped to re-elect George W. Bush in 2004, in spite of a rickety economy and the disastrous invasion of Iraq. They had waged a successful campaign in Washington to restrict access to late-term abortion. They had launched a series of ballot initiatives intended to prevent states or judges legalising gay marriage ...”

“... labelling it the ‘most fatal’ of habits and Kant denouncing it as a moral madness more destructive than suicide. By the early 19th century, masturbation had become the ‘moloch of the species’, as J.H. Kellogg, the American health reformer and cereal king, described it in the typically apocalyptic rhetoric of anti-onanists. Female ...”

“... by M.H. Abrams and others, had held that ‘the medieval period in English literature extends for more than 800 years’ and included Old English as well as Middle English poetry. By the late 1990s, the Norton Anthology had seen off the rival Oxford Anthology, produced by heavyweight academics including Frank Kermode and Harold Bloom, and the deep histories ...”

“... four parallel texts on the page (edited from the lucubrations of the great and good Sir Thomas Urquhart, a fellow Scottish patriot and eccentric genius), prints the vowels and consonants of a passage on separate pages, and interrupts the text with blank sections (where the manuscript was supposedly nibbled by mice). Not all of Gray’s literary ...”

“... shining sea. Given the primitive state of transportation and communication in the early republic, Thomas Jefferson anticipated that two or more independent nations would eventually come into being, though he hoped they would live in peace, unlike the countries of Europe. One political leader who apparently tried to act on ...”

“... Yevtushenko’s face, more cadaverous by the year, stares morosely from the flap of Wild Berries. The camera has evidently caught him thinking of his native Taiga, the Siberian tundra which forms the idyllic background to the novel. In fact, the background of Wild Berries, which is not the best ordered of narratives, rather usurps the foreground, and for much of its length the novel reads like over-the-top Intourist travel literature, aimed at rehabilitating a region associated in the foreign mind (at least) with exile, sub-zero temperatures and days in the life of Soviet dissidents ...”

“... brews quietly up within its own bowels,’ Huxley wrote, ‘few, it seems to me, are more deadly (while none appears more harmless) than that curious and appalling thing which is technically known as “pleasure”.’ Huxley recoiled from America’s embrace of manufactured pleasure. He believed that ...”

“... MacIntyre), or Marxist critics of liberal modernity (Theodor Adorno) – are more condemnatory. The second conception is typically held by historians, who have largely abandoned grand narratives of the Enlightenment. As they see it, the evidence is too complicated, and the totalising approach conflates political and intellectual ...”

“... role. Miller reflects on the difficulty posed nowadays by the introduction of devils and hell. Thomas Mann, modern enough, has his Faustian character succumb to syphilis and madness, and evokes hell in terms, chillingly authentic, of the concentration camps. In their appearance as Romantic heroes, rebels against religious law, social convention or ...”

“... axles at the Central Statistics Bureau. The Industrial Radicals have made Britain a richer and more egalitarian country: but they have also turned their information system into a political weapon, even making their enemies ‘disappear’ as in the Argentine terror of the 1970s. The plot of the novel, in brief, is that a freakishly hot summer has brought ...”

“... musical facts; and such subjective elements as enter into one’s commentary on music are neither more nor less damaging than those that occur in reference to any human activity. I cannot prove that my account of a problematical work like Beethoven’s Op.101 is unequivocally right. I can however demonstrate that it is a possible, even probable, deduction ...”

“... sort of life story that can be properly told in fifty words is not worth including. To invoke a more constructive example, the makers of the Christian creeds showed how pregnant economy – ‘crucified, dead and buried’ – could get around the problem. A further alternative would be to adopt the stylised format of Who’s Who or Debrett (Henry VIII, 2nd ...”

“... of tears:                   But he a few green eares: Ah Loyterer! I’le no more, no more I’le bring:                  I did expect a ring. The book, in her accustomed manner, is both elegiac and hopeful. It gives a sense of pity for lost opportunities, but at the same time a ...”