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“... being a magnificent writer (and saved for us Anglo-Saxons by having found translators – notably Alan Bass – who are able to carry off a nearly impossible task). To see Derrida at his best, try the essay ‘White Mythology’. This is the most convincing piece in this volume (except perhaps for a remarkable essay on Heidegger, ‘Ousia and ...”

“... Bait them and the Derrideans certainly rise. When the English version of Derrida’s Glas appeared last year in the United States*, I wrote a griping review of it, to regret mainly that a philosopher as brilliantly fresh and radical as Derrida should want to publish something so mannered and so hard to follow. Some of the North American faithful objected to this review, and one, a professor of philosophy in Scranton, wrote a letter warning that I had failed not just Derrida but our whole benighted community ...”

“... the world since Mrs Thatcher in that gritty hard little word. 2 May. Several of the obituaries of Alan Sillitoe who died last week mention how, when as a child he was being hit by his father, his mother would beg ‘Not on his head. Not on his head.’ My father was a mild man and seldom hit my brother or me but when he did my mother would make the same ...”

“... Le Pétomane, and that he should have become a cult figure in Britain only in the 1960s, after Alan Brien’s pioneering articles on breaking wind in the New Statesman. The elimination of odour from English literature, and even from English pornography, in the 19th and 20th centuries argues deep internalised censorships, even within libertine ...”

“... copyright), but because technical mastery of the traditional pop instruments – guitars, drums, bass and keyboards – is now a thing of the past. Far from viewing technology as a threat, Beadle insists that the music-makers who, since 1987, have come to the charts carrying samplers have brought life to a music scene starved of ideas. Sampling can be ...”

“... of a certain exercise in which ‘one had to lake a deep breath and pronounce first in a deep bass voice: “Wyryta zastupom yama globokaya” [Russian for ‘A deep pit dug out with a spade’], then chatter quickly in a tenor: “Wykopana szpadlem jama gleboka” [the same, in Polish]. The arrangement of accents and vowels in the first connotes ...”

“... a speech was made by a bishop in full fig which I swear must have been scripted for him by Alan Bennett: as he delivered it, he actually performed the gesture of appearing to be washing his hands which I thought even the most unctuous prelates had been teased out of decades ago. The prefects, as it were, are tail-coated men who look like, and probably ...”

“... do understand, through and through, because it is our own invention, or rather the invention of Alan Turing and John von Neumann. The now famous Universal Turing Machine was an imaginary device that could rearrange any row of l’s and 0’s in accordance with any finite set of rules supplied to it; the von Neumann computer is its electronic ...”

“... World of Echo in my office at home recently, I popped downstairs and was amazed to hear a big bass boom pulsing through the floor like a dub track. As if Russell’s music were itself a house where there are no dividing walls and everything can’t help but leak through.Cruise all the different Arthur Russells on YouTube and the comments range from an ...”

“... soul and R&B. Sam Phillips did not invent rock ’n’ roll, a term coined by the Cleveland DJ Alan Freed in the early 1950s. Black musicians did in the 1940s, as the big black swing bands were dying off and smaller ensembles took over, offering stripped-down, up-tempo music with a repetitive beat, honking saxophones showcasing the vocalists, boogie-woogie ...”

“... to the record sleeve, Bowie played most of the guitar on Diamond Dogs (1974) himself. But Alan Parker, whose contribution is acknowledged for only one song, ‘1984’, perhaps deserves more credit than that. Of the guitar part on ‘Rebel Rebel’, Parker told Trynka: ‘I can tell my own playing, and my own sound, and I know it’s me.’ Diamond ...”

“... available to each generation in their youth and then remain with them: a background, forgotten bass rhythm throughout their lives. Certainly, I had forgotten about reading Erving Goffman in the late 1960s and early 1970s: Asylums, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life and, I think, Stigma. They were required reading, part of the unofficial University ...”

“... Mortimer achieves a kind of apotheosis at a party where the dancers are masked as Reagan, Nixon, Alan Greenspan and Hillary Clinton: ‘Club of the Now!’ he shouts. And when he hurts people, it’s because he wants to make them as inauthentic as he is: ‘Maybe I cut because I want them to have no face too.’ Hannah himself is rumoured to have pulled a ...”

“... through texture, beats and effects. Back in 1976, punk set itself against disco wholeheartedly. Alan Jones and Jussi Kantonen describe an occasion in July 1979 at the home stadium of the Chicago White Sox baseball team when thousands of disco records were set alight while the crowd chanted ‘Disco sucks, Disco sucks!’ The 1989 edition of the Penguin ...”

“... house. That’s the story. But all along the way, plucking out another melody, as it were, on the bass strings, all the way from the barn to the bed and back again, Guthrie picks out a tale about poverty and man’s relationship to the land. It’s not just fiction, it’s testimony; it’s folklore; it’s ‘The Ballad of Tike and Ella May’. Guthrie seems ...”