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“... Pola Oloixarac​ has written three novels, though calling them novels seems too reassuringly bland. They’re baroquely layered with ideas, hacker theory, anthropology, natural history, mythology, dystopias. I admire them very much, but reading them can also bring moments of boredom or impatience. Ideas are allowed to expand in unexpected habitats ...”

“... In The Morris Book (1907), a work that did much to foster the 20th-century revival of interest in English folk dancing, Cecil Sharp both acknowledges and attempts to repress the hybrid, extra-national origins of the morris dance: The weight of the testimony must be held to show Morocco as the fount and origin, no matter if the genius of our own folk – so far removed from anything native to Africa – has, in the process of the centuries, altered it until it bears, in spirit, little resemblance to the parent stock ...”

“... to predict an Israeli attack. On 18 July 2008 in the New York Times, the Israeli historian Benny Morris claimed that ‘Israel will almost surely attack Iran’s nuclear sites in the next four to seven months.’ Like Goldberg, he made much of Israel’s fear that ‘its very existence was at stake’ so long as the ...”

“... the pseudonym ‘George Eliot’ has proved so durable. It persisted long after the identity of Adam Bede’s author had become public knowledge, and there has been no serious attempt to dislodge it since. Why has George Eliot never been known by her own name? One reason is that it has never been quite clear what it was. She began life as Mary Anne ...”

“... stunner, an artistic, if not a liberated alternative to conventional femininity. Unlike Janey Morris, whose remarkable appearance was so close to Rossetti’s pictures of her that Henry James was unsure whether she was an original or a copy, the Macdonald sisters, though strikingly attractive, were not in the heavy-eyed big-haired vein. If they were, as ...”

“... frequently recalls other masters of strange, urgent sentences: Monty Python; Samuel Beckett; Chris Morris in Blue Jam; and perhaps most vividly of all, Vivian Stanshall in Sir Henry at Rawlinson End. In fact, A Humument is a novel of quotation: not only in the sense that all of its words were written first by Mallock (although not, as Eric Morecambe said of ...”

“... he loves). In Some Like It Hot, the talent booker, Mr Poliakoff, is on the phone to the William Morris Agency. Standing in his office are Jerry and Joe – Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis – a bass and a saxophone player. Jerry tries to persuade Poliakoff to give them the job – three weeks in Florida with Sweet Sue and her Society Syncopators – but ...”

“... of the obnoxious frat boys; Jojo Johanssen, the only white boy on the college basketball team; and Adam Gellin, a poor, resentful, Jewish scholarship student. Hoyt gets there first, when, after several hundred pages of will-she-won’t-she, she forgets her nobler ambitions, gets drunk for the first time ever, and is brutally deflowered in a hotel room. As far ...”

“... bookish, for I remember browsing on the shelves of his college room and picking up a copy of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, a set book for our History prelims, only to find in it the daunting inscription: ‘To Raphael on his eighth birthday.’ Since those days, Samuel has earned a distinctive place in the annals of British historiography as a ...”

“... akin to Dorothy L. Sayers’s Wimsey. Incidentally, P.D. James’s own detective hero, Commander Adam Dalgliesh, with his supplementary profession of poet, is sometimes singled out for acerbic comment by those to whom the notion of a literary detective is a cause of exasperation: in the same way, Wimsey, with his blue blood, prodigious assets, including ...”

“... become the site of The Concise Dictionary of Dress, a collaboration between the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips and the exhibition maker Judith Clark. The project was commissioned by Artangel, which has had a hand in other transformative events – for example, Francis Alÿs’s CCTV footage of a fox exploring the National Portrait Gallery at night. On your ...”

“... taught, it could make him seem unfeeling. One of his pupils, who was briefly a pupil of mine, was Adam Roberts, now Professor of International Relations at Oxford. Adam was a demy at Magdalen and was thought likely to get a first but didn’t; he was understandably a little mortified but his self-reproach can’t have been ...”

“... not that you’d know from a walk around the city centre or a visit to Cowley Road. The main Morris site was demolished in 1993, in what was billed as ‘one of the largest land clearance projects in Western Europe’. I was two years into my time as a student in Oxford and too involved in my doctorate to pay attention to what was happening three miles ...”

“... its themes, it cannot be described as deeply engaged. A few 18th-century and Victorian gurus – Adam Smith, Bentham, Ruskin – put in brief appearances, and Marx just makes it into a footnote. But of the later sophisticated theorists of things and social behaviour – Durkheim, Gramsci, Barthes, Bourdieu, Lévi-Strauss – there’s never a whisper. The ...”

“... liner in the mid-Atlantic: lurid with suicide, Victorian capitalism got a very bad press. In 1776 Adam Smith had argued in The Wealth of Nations that free-market capitalism was a force for material and moral progress. Capitalism left to itself, he insisted, must produce the best of all possible worlds, since a capitalist pursuing self-interest makes life ...”