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“... Virtue is achieved by the act of naming the virtuous. Beautiful slicks of Adorno and Walter Benjamin that don’t quite fit together (like the M25). You start to feel, convince yourself, that you’ve actually read these books. Passive absorption (Clinton style): the compulsory hallucination of living through those counterculture years. Watson’s early ...”

“... the telling itself has an inward, rather than an outward, orientation: the interior of Africa, the black heart of Kurtz. His comments on those novels (The Secret Agent, Under Western Eyes) where the political subject-matter is most concretely particularised are especially alert. Perhaps this suggests that Said is at his best with authors who offer equal scope ...”

“... synaesthesia, his interest in birds), three short reminiscences by former pupils, Boulez, George Benjamin and Hill himself, and Loriod’s interview with Hill. Part Two consists of seven essays, of which three are on individual works: La Transfiguration de Notre-Seigneur Jésus-Christ, Des canyons aux étoiles ... and the opera Saint François ...”

“... for a ‘historic photo’. A military cameraman points his camera at the soldiers. But when the black and white photo appears on screen it isn’t the soldiers we see: it’s the puzzled group of Arab-Palestinian figures at the other end of the room, ordinary people, onlookers. They, and others like them, are central figures in the work of Hillel ...”

“... of humanitarian crisis, much of urban Gaza has been turned into an uneven igneous landscape of black-grey mounds.In Israel the desire for retribution for the 7 October attack was widespread. But the Israeli army clearly knew much less about what was happening inside Gaza than it thought it did. If Israel had been blind to an assault so meticulously planned ...”

“... Twenties, when Roth started writing them, Alfred Polgar was the most celebrated exponent. Walter Benjamin called Polgar ‘the German master of the small form’. In 1935, writing in honour of Polgar’s 60th birthday, Roth said that he considered himself Polgar’s pupil: ‘He polishes the ordinary until it becomes extraordinary ... I have learned this ...”

“... Bacon took her to a ‘bad street’, what she saw was a place ‘just crammed with people, mostly black people, walking on the sidewalks and sitting on the stoops and leaning out of the windows’. In the ‘good one’, by contrast, there was just a lone boy kicking a tyre into a gutter. ‘Ed, nobody’s here,’ she said to Bacon, according to Robert ...”

“... brewery and the wild gardens of adjacent streets. Joseph flogged the Gainsborough portrait of Sir Benjamin Truman, the brewmaster, asset-stripped the operation and bought up surrounding acres in canny anticipation of future development packages, the coming world of retro frocks, Moroccan internet cafés and ‘plastinated’ freakshow corpse art by Gunther ...”

“... formally Penman’s book is exceptionally polite, with its aphorisms, its extended quotes from Benjamin and Barthes, its skipping hippety-hop between memoir, analysis and slogan. That the style is rather familiar is perhaps a measure of Penman’s influence. It’s a style he dismisses at one point as ‘the cult of the little and the lost, the sliver and ...”

“... by him. Often, having the errors pointed out to him, he refused to sanction changes. This is a black mark against him? Not at all, says Ms Froula: the very fact that he refused revisions when these were offered shows that he repudiated for and in his poem any conception of human history as possessing a factual truth beyond the variously unreliable ...”

“... because they’re mainly used to freshen up a dim memory of something Winston Churchill (or was it Benjamin Franklin?) might have once said. But that practice is also a long-term consequence of the history of the word ‘quotation’ and its weaponisation in religious polemics of the 17th century.Works calling themselves ‘dictionaries’ of quotations began ...”

“... he adopted a new, liberal constitution and openly abjured his old projects of conquest. He seduced Benjamin Constant, his keenest and sharpest liberal critic, into becoming a collaborator. And on Saint Helena, enduring the petty humiliations inflicted by his British jailer, Sir Hudson Lowe, the vaguely comic turned intensely tragic; a man mocked as pathetic ...”

“... for a beautiful young woman to see to him as Jane Eyre looked after old Mr Rochester,’ Benjamin Taylor writes in his memoir, Here We Are. ‘What he got instead was me.’ Taylor was young, goyish and gay, all of which Roth was not. ‘I can’t be the first gay man to have been an older straight man’s mainstay,’ Taylor writes, but the ...”

“... boundaries came into existence, to reinforce the physical ones – the ‘White’ and ‘Black’ town – that were already there. The social and racial structure of the India Kipling was born in and later returned to as a journalist was determined by the Mutiny and, later, by the defeat of the Ilbert Bill, which would have given Indian magistrates ...”

“... no longer even figure in the top hundred. Andrew and Robert are barely hanging on. But Joshua, Benjamin, Samuel and Joseph have been restored to the places they held two hundred years ago, after languishing for years in the unfashionable regions of the charts. It is even possible to trace the rise of particular combinations of sounds. The popularity of ...”