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“... I wanted something bigger, broader, deeper, and I wanted to know about Marx and Hegel and Walter Benjamin – I had a crush on Benjamin, actually, as a result of the essay with which Hannah Arendt introduced her selection of his work in Illuminations, and Susan Sontag’s ‘Under the Sign of Saturn’ (1978). I would have ...”

“... of her Irish-American sentiments. Patricia’s father’s stories of the Great Hunger, the Black and Tans and the Easter Rising are always there in the background, like the didactic paintings on the back walls of Vermeer’s interiors. When the inevitable pay-off comes, however, and Mickey turns out, unsurprisingly, to be a murderer (and, much worse, a ...”

“... repeats. In one of these, Xenophanes observes that Ethiopians say their gods are snubnosed and black, while Thracians say theirs have blue eyes and red hair (‘gray eyes’ in Auden). Another is by Kafka: ‘The true way goes over a rope which is not stretched at any great height but just above the ground. It seems more designed to make men stumble than ...”

“... DeLillo, where again Walden and Thoreau feature, this time as inspiration for a novelist called Benjamin Sachs, whose dissatisfaction with writing fiction as a way of engaging with the world leads him, via Austerian chains of coincidence, to a campaign of symbolic terrorism as the ‘Phantom of Liberty’, blowing up replicas of the Statue of Liberty across ...”

“... of Burke has a long history, going back at least as far as the 1830s and 1840s, when Benjamin Disraeli concocted lineages of authentic Toryism which he distinguished from mere conservatism. Disraeli’s hero was Viscount Bolingbroke, the leader of the Tories in the early 18th century, but he also found a place for Burke, notwithstanding the Whig ...”

“... unreal, the deathly, the disguised, the predatory, the phantasmagoric? The famous tagline Walter Benjamin borrowed from Leopardi – ‘Fashion: Madame Death! Madame Death!’ – seems made for the world Ensor shows. ‘The Intrigue’ (1890) Look again at The Intrigue and Skeletons Fighting. What seems to me stupendous about them (and thoroughly ...”

“... make good on your debts, but also whether you were the kind of person likely to do so. It is as if Benjamin Franklin had anticipated this intensity of scrutiny when he wrote, in his ‘Advice to a Young Tradesman’ in 1748: The most trifling actions that affect a man’s credit are to be regarded. The sound of your hammer at five in the morning, or nine at ...”

“... with John Lamb, in the course of a dispute about Holbein and Vandyke. I will quote the version in Benjamin Haydon’s journal: ‘They both became so irritated, they upset the card-table, and seized each other by the throat. In the struggle that ensued, Hazlitt got a black eye; but when the two combatants were ...”

“... and it was there, on her arrival, that Hannah Arendt deposited the surviving manuscripts of Walter Benjamin. Characteristically, and perhaps accurately, she thought that the Frankfurt people handled them dishonestly. New York in the Fifties was Weimar in partibus. There are emigrations and emigrations. Chateaubriand elegantly described the French emigration of ...”

“... rhythmic loops of Indian music kickstarted his first pieces of minimalism. A generation earlier, Benjamin Britten had been entranced by Shankar’s first British performances. Yehudi Menuhin’s reputation as a child prodigy was built on the recording he made of Elgar’s Violin Concerto in 1932, but he too was steered onto a different path by Shankar.It’s ...”

“... had been wearing which were so incredibly loud in colour. And Matisse, exasperated, answered “Black, obviously”.’ It was a joke. But the joke was a good one; and therefore it concentrated an amount of conscious and unconscious thinking in a single reversal of terms. The joke set me thinking straight away of Baudelaire’s choice of ...”

“... and inconsequence. Love in a Life offers anecdotes in search of a narrative. Death, as Walter Benjamin implied, gives life to stories, and intimations of mortality recur in Motion’s anecdotes. The opening poem evokes, with hallucinatory vividness, a dream-vision of ‘last century’s man ... / (spats and port waistcoat / in clackety half-light)’ on a ...”

“... being the, in retrospect, remarkably undistinguished all-Palestinians-are-terrorists thriller Black Sunday. Red Dragon’s back story, as these things are called in Hollywood, is that Graham is the man who caught Dr Lecter, thanks to his special ability to enter the imaginative world of serial killers. (One period touch is that in those days – Red ...”

“... is appropriate to the extravagance of the myth. Parallels with some of Heinrich Mann’s black comedies, with the use of fable and grotesquerie in The Tin Drum, perhaps with Marquez, come to mind. Syberberg uses Brechtian techniques of alienation (placards, back-projection, narrative monologue) to achieve the same distancing effect. But he does not ...”

“... and omissions. The scope of the inclusions is certainly impressive, with attention given to black and woman writers and to a broader range of British writing than might have been expected from an American critic: there can be few readers who will not find ways into new poetic territory from this enthusiastically written book. Perkins is at times forced ...”