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“... play for the second time, ‘that I was glad to begin to graze, instead, on the verbs in mi.’ Browsing, like a heifer, through first-person Greek verbs, she ‘turned “me”’, as Prins puts it, ‘into the “I” of Io’. The wordplay was tied into ambiguities about language acquisition and ...”

“... of mind’, it must be a broad category indeed to contain two such different representatives as John Henry Newman and James Fitzjames Stephen. They shared a distrust of reform and democracy, a love of England, and a penchant for getting into controversy in print. Otherwise, they strike one as chalk and cheese, or ‘dog and fish’, as Newman put it, à ...”

“... 155 east-west streets drawn on open land in 1807. The grid was a piece of real estate speculation (John Jacob Astor made his fortune not by trading furs, as American folklore has it, but by buying up blocks as the city pushed north); nevertheless, Koolhaas calls it, with Corbusierian hyperbole, ‘the most courageous act of prediction in Western ...”

“... the dark water of the paddy fields. An out-of-work student with a motorbike for hire drove me to the Shaoshan Guesthouse. It was damp and empty except for a group of civil servants visiting at official expense. In the village square, some workers were desultorily clearing the ground where a statue of Mao is to be erected – the first in nearly twenty ...”

“... the beheading of Charles I. In October 1660, he ‘went out to Charing Cross to see Major-General Harrison hanged, drawn and quartered; which was done there, he looking as cheerful as any man could do in that condition. He was presently cut down, and his head and heart shown to the people, at which there was great shouts of joy.’ Pepys had no hesitation in ...”

“... By 1963​ , John Cage had become an unlikely celebrity. Anyone who knew anything about music – who had perhaps followed the perplexed reviews in the New York Times – could tell you how he had managed to transform the piano into a one-man percussion ensemble by wedging nails, bolts and erasers between its strings; or how he had – ‘and you’re never gonna believe this’ – somehow composed silent music ...”

“... as the youngest son. He reproduced this situation in Lucretia (1846), in which the heir of the St John’s Laughton estate marries the heiress of Vernon Grange. ‘Two sons were born. To the elder was destined his father’s inheritance – to the younger the maternal property. One house is not large enough for two heirs. Nothing could exceed the pride of the ...”

“... and living informants. His new book may be seen as a courteous but firm reproof to those who, like me, brought up on Arthur Machen, John Buchan, Rosemary Sutcliff, Mary Renault and Henry Treece, not to mention H.P. Lovecraft, got the wrong idea a long time ago and have been reluctant to abandon it. The wrong idea is the ...”

“... were written to the poet August Kleinzahler between 1994 and 2002. Boulder itself getting on my nerves. It’s sickeningly sweet and rich and white and every single resident has a golden lab. I’m rigging up a pit on the corner. Clerks don’t say ‘enjoy’ anymore they say ‘thrive.’ ...”

“... obsession with masculinity from James Fenimore Cooper through Owen Wister, Zane Grey and John Ford to Sergio Leone and Sam Peckinpah. His subject is the well-known tautology that a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do. For Mitchell, the Western novel is essentially theatrical – a stage on which male identity is enacted, as well as a form of ...”

“... it, producing not only Rockwell, Guest and the Saturday Evening Post but also Georges Simenon, John Steinbeck and the New Yorker (‘high-class kitsch for the luxury trade’). With kitsch running wild, like the capitalism which propelled it, authenticity needed defending. For nearly fifty years, Greenberg shouldered the task, separating good art from bad ...”

“... We are living through a great era of saint-making. Under John Paul II an industrial revolution has overtaken the Vatican, an age of mass production. Saints are fast-tracked to the top, and there are beatifications by the bucket-load. It seems a shame to have all the virtues required for beatification, but not to get your full name in the Catholic Almanac Online ...”

“... I try the Twickenham ploy ... And yet I play this game only to thaw That icy stare, because I’m still in awe Of your most private self, that self you spill Into the poems you keep locked away ... On his way home from India in 1947, MacNeice stopped in Egypt to see the sights and was observed to gaze for a long time at the Sphinx: ‘Francis Worsley ...”

“... works in Chinese, English, Russian, French and Italian. These include many that are unfamiliar to me and perhaps to many other specialists on Chinese Communist history and politics.As their subtitle proclaims, in virtually every chapter Chang and Halliday have turned up ‘unknown stories’ of Mao. Some, if true, will be big news for historians. Mao amassed ...”

“... a culture that in 1955 could still unselfconsciously appeal to the tropes of the chase (just as in my childhood, Christmas cards regularly featured garish images of the Boxing Day meet)? Either way, this brilliant piece of writing (as it is in many ways) is a quite different rhetorical and political enterprise from the embryonic sociology it is so often ...”