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“... The main thing that Googling will tell you about Ben Fountain is that he’s – depending on your point of view – a slow learner, a model of staying power and resilience, a maniacal perfectionist, or a living vindication of underachieving literary househusbands. That’s because the journalistic handle on him, established by Malcolm Gladwell in a New Yorker piece, is that he wrote fiction full-time for 18 years before publishing his first book ...”

“... scrag-end of grass, pinioned by Charles Barry’s impressively ugly Woman of Samaria, a statue-cum-fountain that features a pious looking Late Victorian nudie menacing a crippled crone with a ewer. I’ve never actually seen so much as a piddle of water emerge from Barry’s fountain, which, as statuary commissions go, must ...”

“... their cunning ways: they were not Poets Laureate. Who was? Well, the first is usually said to be Ben Jonson, followed by D’Avenant and Dryden, who was given the title officially. Then came Shadwell, Tate, Rowe, Eusden (who celebrated the Duke of Newcastle from whom he received the office and ‘sleeps among the dull of ancient days’ in Pope’s ...”

“... Israel Spreads its contagion in your English blood; Teeming corruption rises like a flood Whose fountain swelters in the womb of hell. Your Jew-kept politicians buy and sell In markets redolent of Jewish mud, And while the ‘Learned Elders’ chew the cud Of liquidation’s fruits, they weave their spell. That is Lord Alfred Douglas on Judaism, further ...”

“... struck by the quite exceptional devotion of those who did. They found him lovable; and when he and Ben Nicolson founded a luncheon club they flocked to it. He was affectionate and generous, marvellously funny but convinced that the world in which he lived was insufferable and that he must do what he could to save it. One or two of his close friends may have ...”

“... Say Yes to Syria.’ ‘How could anyone be stupid enough to think he’d just leave like Ben-Ali or Mubarak?’ the driver asked, waving his hand dismissively. ‘The Assads’ arses are stuck to their chairs with superglue.’ When protesters began playing around with the family name, they were striking at the symbolic pillars of ‘Assad’s ...”

“... cat watching me. Two topazes with ears. ... I tilt up and pan along my trail of mountains from Ben More Coigach all the way to Quinag. An old ewe brings me down to the earth she stamps her forefoot on. I look at her implacable whisky and soda eyes. She knows all a sheep needs to know: she’s a black-stockinged bluestocking. And a spinnaker line has ...”

“... respect from the sultans and pashas in Constantinople and Ottoman Baghdad. Sheikh Sassoon ben Saleh Sassoon was appointed chief treasurer by the Ottomans in 1781. Ezikiel Gabbay, a Baghdadi banker, was chief treasurer and adviser to Sultan Mahmud II in the early 19th century. Until the creation of the state of Israel, most of Iraq’s 135,000 Jews ...”

“... lustres and frangibilities of rocks. Stones have differing senses of saturation: ‘The granite fountain seems impervious, the water glassy: the limestone or marble fountain, on the other hand, seems to become organic beneath the water, to be sluiced, refreshed . . . The water is the finery of a caressing mother.’ You ...”

“... contemporaries, it was perhaps because freer methods allowed him to encompass a wider sphere. Ben Jonson mocked Shakespeare’s ascribing a sea-coast to Bohemia, but such locations recurred throughout his world: it was a place where the random felt at home and the uncontrollable was ordered into art. Hence the startling but true forms of Hamlet, Antony ...”

“... locket Mussolini had given her. Inscribed in it were the words: ‘Clara, I am you and you are me. Ben 24 April 1932-24 April 1941.’ What Claretta and Mussolini had in common, apart from sex, was a deep certainty that Mussolini was the greatest leader the world had seen since the death of Napoleon. When things went wrong, it was always someone else’s ...”

“... at the top and children hop round it. Someone sand-sculpts a huge-breasted Gaia opposite Big Ben and another makes a six-foot-long penis with pubic hair of straw. The statues are decorated. Lord Derby has a spliff in his hand. Jan Smuts is wearing a cycling mask. Churchill has his famous grass mohican and ‘murderer’ painted on the plinth by the ...”

“... to appear. Life is to be one long dive into the hidden depths, and anything we find there will be ben trovato. The ocean in which we are to plunge is the Jungian collective unconscious. This concept has been the cause of more misunderstandings, in adherents and opponents alike, than anything else in Jung’s thought. The commonest misdirection is to forget ...”

“... Her discussion of automata opens with a 17th-century engraving that lays bare the workings of a fountain where Galatea pirouetted on a sea-shell while a frustrated Polyphemus played on his pipes. She also describes some of the musical automata built by Jacques de Vaucanson in the 1730s. Audiences were impressed by their musicianship at the time, but since ...”

“... as a fact and as a necessary symbol is played out in the apparently endless hunt for Old Ben, a bear with a mangled foot and a ‘long legend’ of destructiveness that haunts the imagination of young Ike McCaslin: It ran in his knowledge before he ever saw it. It loomed and towered in his dreams before he even saw the unaxed woods where it left its ...”