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“... Both David Cressy and Cynthia Herrup believe they are writing microhistory, a word coined by Italians, but used to describe above all the work of Natalie Zemon Davis (The Return of Martin Guerre, 1983) and Robert Darnton (The Great Cat Massacre, 1984). Microhistorians have turned to the verbatim records of interrogations kept in the law courts of early modern Europe (or at least those parts of Europe where Roman law procedures were followed) to reconstruct the detailed stories of individual trials ...”

“... to be gaining a presence not just in politics but in pop culture too. That same month, May 1976, David Bowie was photographed at Victoria Station on his return to Britain after two years in North America. Standing in an open-topped Mercedes, he appeared to give his fans some kind of open-handed, straight-armed – possibly fascist – salute. Soon afterwards ...”

“... David Thomson​ is best known for a series of surveys of the history of cinema as Olympian in scope as they are in evenness of tone, the most notable being his indispensable Biographical Dictionary of Film from 1975, subsequently updated in a series of editions as the New Biographical Dictionary of Film. His latest book, The Fatal Alliance, is every bit as commanding in its succinct description and analysis of a wide variety of films, good, bad and (mostly) indifferent ...”

“... with apologies to Craig Raine) Caxtons are bred in batteries. If you take one from its perch, a girl Must stun it with her fist before you bring it home. Learning is when you watch a conjurer with fifty minutes’ patter and no tricks. Students are dissidents: knowing their rooms are bugged, they Take care never to talk Except against the blare of music ...”

“... Human versus Robot It keeps on doing its best, That reddish thing inside me Pumping-pumping against The obstinate, tortuous fankle Of pulpy valves and tubeworms. Are they up to it any more – Thin-skinned, semi-elastic, A labyrinth of Victorian sewers, A sort of organic circuit board That badly needs rewiring? Titanium would do better, A tiny refined-alloy sleeve Inserted deep in the pulsing darkness ...”

“... Stone hides itself in itself and thinks itselfInvisible. Its breathing is the near-death rhythmOf hibernation. There is nothing of this in the word stone; and everything. The word of God is stone. Your lover’s last look back is stone. You take stone to your heart. You lift a stone from the beach and it fits your hand –Fits just so, is sure to find its matchIn the way your fingers close and make a seal,The rub of salt to flesh (augur of sin, so quick in memory), how it leaches heat from your skin, reads your palm, tests your smell, measures your heartbeat, settles to sleep, as stones roll in the wavebreak, as daylight dies –Dies touch by touch and you are left to chance,To moonrise, to what you know of bones and the sea,Of the bloodless shapes that come to you in dream ...”

“... as an occasion for otherwise elusive experience. It came to represent the modern in general, as David Welsh ably demonstrates in two immense chapters, one on utopian fantasy from the turn of the 20th century, the other on the inevitable ensuing sourness. In Anticipations (1902), H.G. Wells imagined the Metropolitan Railway’s ‘black and ...”

“... The condition (cancer) and the person (myself) Reeled towards each other over the years, Capsules slowly converging. Now they have docked – ‘Raped!’ the Soviet spacemen used to shout As the new arrival fitted in.                                               The surgeon Is using homely words: ‘We will take away Everything except the nerves and muscles’ (That’s sound, just what I would have done myself ...”

“... Feverish After Yannis Ritsos Small squares on the move, merging, pulling apart, building bricks unbuilding, a city of windows inside a city of windows, everything hanging on two right-angles, free-standing, out of whack but somehow holding, somehow safe you decide at the very moment they crack and start to collapse (in utter silence) all of a heap where three fleabitten dogs set off at an easy lope going first through one small square then another, and etcetera, the scent of the alien dead ripe in their nostrils ...”

“... We are waiting for a Christmas that never came, each species a friend of a friend of some needle-hue. All the years, heights and postures are present like children in a school that no child ever leaves. Each species a friend of a friend of some needle-hue: those adolescent spruces prickle with boredom like children in a school that no child ever leaves ...”

“... leaving behind     only yourself and     the door unlocked venture down     the avenue for the messages     becoming the street as you go          and keeping an eye out for a hole in your shoe     the dog’s first worda bundle of rye     tomorrow’s papera pub with no beer     a hole in the sky they ...”

“... Caroline Herschel‘Index to Flamsteed’s Observations of the Fixed Stars’, 1798Caroline Herschel turns her telescopeon her first comet, its swan’s neck of snowdipping into the dark water of space.The curved tine of its tail trailing, flickeringsignalling for a likeness of lightamong the nebulae and unbroken nightwhere two swans of ice and stone might sweepthe perihelion in parallel parabolasof double stars and orbiting pairs ...”

“... forced to fight on alone without any official communal support. The outstanding figure here was David Salomons, whose repeated efforts as a professing Jew to obtain election to the Court of Aldermen of the City of London was rewarded in 1845 with an Act which allowed Jews to hold any municipal office. After the passage of this law, it was clear that only ...”

“... movies and now the video footage. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, I was working on the life of David O. Selznick, the man who produced Gone with the Wind, Rebecca and Duel in the Sun. It was a great help, yet a daunting obstacle, that Selznick had kept virtually every bit of paper that passed through his office. But the family archive had other ...”

“... How this pale dawn light floods in from the skyline.How it seems almost at times to fail as if it mightfall back to midnight’s deep blue-black: as if it should.I am given over to dreams that say what’s mine is mine.I dreamt I was at this window and here I am:not dreaming, or so I think, though something stays.Dream has its flow, pain its own song to sing ...”