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“... a plucked fowl, but had no thought of being misunderstood.Today’s barber is my partner, Rupert Thomas, who, while professing to admire my abundant locks, manages to make me look like a blond Hitler. He was also wondering if he could save the offcuts in case they might find a market on eBay.2 March. I’ve written somewhere of one of Dad’s ...”

“... enjoyed hay rides in the back of her ‘Uncle’ John’s hay cart; that she has a brother called Thomas and another called William and a twin sister called Elizabeth; that her mother recently died of cancer; that her father is called Hastings and is a retired colonel. That is about it. This might serve as a modest sketch of someone’s life, but is wholly ...”

“... who disliked them (most people?) pointed the finger at his upstart ministers, and above all at Thomas Cromwell, whose personal role in ‘all this’ is still debated. The way in which the commotions began tends to support the view of, among others, Abraham Lincoln and Harold Macmillan that events are the motors of history, not policy ...”

“... the ideas of Southern Agrarians such as John Crowe Ransom and Allen Tate, whose wife, Caroline Gordon, would become an astute reader of drafts of O’Connor’s stories, and a staunch literary advocate. T.S. Eliot, the great hero of the New Critics, and of the Agrarians also, inevitably loomed large too, and in an application for a grant to continue work ...”

“... gimmick: that of seeming either too old or too new’. She notes that the cellphone brandished by Gordon Gekko in Oliver Stone’s Wall Street (1987) – a Motorola DynaTAC 8000X – was simultaneously cutting-edge and obsolete.The gimmick matters most to Ngai as ‘a contrivance that writers, composers and visual artists not only represent but use, deploying ...”

“... 200th birthday was Claire Harman’s Life, the first serious new biography since Lyndall Gordon’s Charlotte Brontë: A Passionate Life in 1994 and Juliet Barker’s The Brontës from the same year (biographies seem to come in generational bursts). All writers on the Brontës now benefit from Margaret Smith’s magisterial – much overdue ...”

“... illustrates almost to the minute what Brendan Gill, late of the New Yorker, christened the ‘Gordon Curve’ after the architect Douglas Gordon of Baltimore. ‘This posits that a building is at its maximum moment of approbation when it is brand-new; that it then goes steadily downhill and at 70 reaches its nadir. If ...”

“... and its vagaries were much discussed at this time, the fashionable theorists being R.D. Laing and Thomas Szasz. Their ideas had never impinged on my father nor were they likely to; balance of mind was something you were entitled to take for granted so far as he was concerned: ‘Item No. 1 on the agenda, to get your Mam back to normal.’ Except affliction ...”

“... music, but there’s only one actual song on the CD, the perversely catchy ‘Celebrity’ (‘Go Gordon/Go Ramsay/Go Beyoncé/Go Beyoncé…’). So how is it supposed to work? Protest dance pop seems as unlikely a proposition as protest chamber music. Complicating the old debate about whether art can serve a political agenda is the still older debate about ...”

“... is catalogued and databased (Nick Hornby with a dash of Derrida). Where graduates of the Gordon Lish ‘mini-me’ academy were often tagged as emotional anorexics and numbed-out narcissists – their sliced-thin sentences leaving a trail of stitches – maximalists like Moody follow the lead of Thomas Pynchon and ...”

“... and religious environments, and were conceived as both summations of and short cuts to learning. Thomas of Ireland’s Manipulus Florum (‘Handful of Flowers’) was compiled in Paris around 1306. It lists quotations under topical headings such as ‘superbia’ (pride) and ‘perseverantia’ (perseverance). Thomas’s ...”

“... that Lois herself had been a high-school supporter of the Socialist Party of America under Norman Thomas and perhaps, at university, an admirer of the young militants whose star rose in the party during the early 1930s. Lois sends a funny letter to her family in December 1936, responding to ‘Mother’s crack that she was sorry I was a ...”

“... Sheila Fitzpatrick, Peter Geoghegan, Jeremy Harding, Owen Hatherley, Abby Innes, Mimi Jiang, Thomas Jones, Laleh Khalili, Jackson Lears, Donald MacKenzie, Thomas Meaney, James Meek, Pankaj Mishra, Azadeh Moaveni, Jan-Werner Müller, Vadim Nikitin, Jacqueline Rose, Jeremy Smith, Daniel Soar, Olena Stiazhkina, Vera ...”

“... on British Sea Songs, including ‘The Sailor’s Hornpipe’; ‘Rule, Britannia!’ composed by Thomas Arne, with orchestration by Malcolm Sargent; and finally ‘Jerusalem’, set to music by Parry, and later reorchestrated by Elgar. All of these involve active participation by the audience which, as the second half advances, becomes ever more ...”

“... or Edwardian toy butchers’ shops. They’re bigger and grander than the one Dad made for Gordon and me c.1940 but whereas these joints are nailed into place, Dad’s were all made to unhook so we could serve them to our imaginary customers at the counter. 25 February. A propos civil liberties the government spokesperson most often put ...”