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“... them to … look through the windows of Canary Wharf and spot canoodling office workers from eight miles away.’ Lotus-eaters of the Shard, drifting in the slow motion that seems to take effect forty or fifty floors above the agitated shuffle of London Bridge, are always on show. And they know it. As they stare out, trying to identify buildings or ...”

“... to the booth that once stood on the Aiken Mine Road in the Mojave Desert in California, about 15 miles from the nearest highway. It even earned a cameo in an episode of The X-Files. Technology’s far-flung outposts in the wilderness have fulfilled a variety of tasks, up to and including the reconfiguration of traditional communities by international ...”

“... to replace it when it breaks down – that is how most household machines are now made.In Jonathan Franzen’s novel The Corrections, Alfred Lambert, a retired railway engineer, sits in the cellar of his house, struggling with his advancing Parkinsonism and a string of Christmas lights. He is stuck somewhere between the culture of strategy three and ...”

“... entrance. Everyone on the train looked terribly prosperous, clean and peaceful as they read about Jonathan King and the Nias earthquake in the Standard. It is amazing to watch the skill with which three people can stand in a rocking train, in a space less than two metres square, without touching each other, and read their papers without falling over. At Baker ...”

“... to Zionism’s master code of Jewish exclusivism seems reduced to mere points on the map miles away from Palestine. Lebanon, the Soviet build-up, Syria, Druze and Shia militancy, the new American-Israeli quasi-treaty – these dominate the landscape, absorb political energies. Two anecdotes give a sense of the political and ideological problem I am ...”

“... but in the anglophone world the burden has fallen on a handful of loyal supporters, such as Jonathan Rosenbaum and Colin MacCabe, supplemented more recently by a new generation of admirers, such as Michael Temple and Michael Witt. In the last few years, happily, there seems to have been a revival of interest, perhaps because Godard has now achieved the ...”

“... already done: by Gill on ‘Salisbury Plain’, by Butler on ‘The Ruined Cottage’, by Jacobus, Jonathan Wordsworth and others. Elsewhere he is less successful. His history is more literary-biographical than intellectual, and he passes by without comment significant work in intellectual history. James Chandler’s Wordsworth’s Second Nature (1984) goes ...”

“... he published Austria, Its Literary, Scientific and Medical Institutions, and in 1849 a book on Jonathan Swift, The Closing Years of Dean Swift’s Life. He was also emerging as a famous doctor, specialising in diseases of the eye and ear, founding the first Eye and Ear Hospital in Dublin. In 1841, he was chosen by the Census Commission to find out more ...”

“... its drop-in stadia, risen overnight from a wilderness of rail tracks and abandoned warehouses. Jonathan Liew, in a World Cup diary for the Observer, wrote about trying to reach a deserted park beside the ‘glittering’ ocean. It was a tempting retreat from the football action. To reach this oasis, he had to fight his way across a six-lane dual ...”

“... was that I was in Moscow, reading an edition of a paper published in London, more than 1500 miles away, a four-hour plane journey. Not actually published, in fact, since it hadn’t been printed yet. The first edition of that day’s Sunday Times, already on its way to newsagents and homes in Scotland and the North and West of England, was out of date ...”

“... my mother’s sleep I fell into the State, And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze. Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life, I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters, When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose. Jarrell was drafted late in 1942. ‘Being in the army,’ he wrote, ‘is like being involved in the ...”

“... which, fifty years or more after it was written, burns on the page. Pathological and homosexual. Jonathan Arac, who edited Matthiessen’s letters, wrote that ‘to create the centrally authoritative critical identity of American Renaissance, much had to be displaced, or scattered, or disavowed.’ Matthiessen was aware of this. In January 1930 he wrote to ...”

“... for this level of qualifications.’ He gets up at 6 a.m. most days and walks the two and a half miles to work listening to music: ‘The music is to stop me thinking about the fact that I’m heading here.’ (His MP3 player is broken, so he has been borrowing his wife’s; he can’t skip quickly enough when it gets to ‘Bailamos’ by Enrique ...”

“... order, a Principal Agreement was signed in March 1931 formally granting the IPC 32,000 square miles of Iraqi territory. A hastily convened Iraqi parliament rubber-stamped a deal endorsing the IPC demand that no taxes be levied, in return for a trifling one-time payment by the consortium. Here was the concessionary economy at work. A ramshackle ...”

“... 18th-century portraits by Thomas Gainsborough, Joshua Reynolds, Arthur Devis, John Opie, Jonathan Richardson and Richard Cosway, among others. The small, unattributed canvas he disposes of in 1928 is not in the same league. But it does come with an intriguing back story. Most of Henry Howard’s family’s wealth originally came from sugar ...”