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“... Plastic! Plastic! The plastic – that frightful word gives me gooseflesh.’ This is Baudelaire, wickedly ventriloquising the neoclassical obsession with ‘the immoderate love of form’ in an essay called ‘The Pagan School’, published in 1852. ‘Plastic’ in this sense was a key criterion of formalist art: ‘plastic art’, ‘plastic merit’ and ‘plastic beauty’ were high compliments ...”

“... Once, recycling was a way of life, conducted without civic ordinances, highway beautification statutes, adopt-a-motorway programmes or special bins for paper, glass and metal. Until the mid-19th century, rag-pickers plied their trade in European and American cities. Quilts were made from clothing scraps; rugs (now, like the quilts, collectors’ items) were made from rags; soap was made at home from wood ashes and grease, tallow candles from animal fat, buttons (as well as dice and dominoes) from bones ...”

“... She would, if asked, tell us many little particulars about the subsequent career of her people,’ Jane Austen’s nephew wrote in his Memoir of his aunt. In this traditionary way we learned that Miss Steele never succeeded in catching the Doctor; that Kitty Bennet was satisfactorily married to a clergyman near Pemberley, while Mary obtained nothing higher than one of her uncle Philips’ clerks, and was content to be considered a star in the society of Meriton; that the ‘considerable sum’ Mrs Norris gave William Price was one pound; that Mr Woodhouse survived his daughter’s marriage, and kept her and Mr Knightley from settling at Donwell, about two years; and that the letters placed by Frank Churchill before Jane Fairfax, which she swept away unread, contained the word ‘pardon ...”

“... Let us consider the names given to horses – not ordinary horses . . . but racehorses,’ writes Claude Lévi-Strauss, opening an excursus on equine onomastics in The Savage Mind. The names of thoroughbreds are ‘rigorously individualised’ and ‘rarely, if ever, describe them’. What counts is the way they can be seen to derive from the horse’s pedigree ...”

“... with professors ‘teaching the conflicts’ as they claw their way up the academic ladder. For Marjorie Garber, William R. Kenan Jr Professor of English at Harvard, the university, if not a utopia, is nonetheless a satisfying environment where intellectual controversy reigns. Garber believes that academic jargon is ...”

“... for one person. At stake in the argument between these two definitions is the larger question, in Marjorie Garber’s words, ‘of whether any sexuality has reference to subject or object’, whether gender entails not merely an identification with one sex but the desire for someone of the other sex. The first, botanical sort of bisexuality is often ...”

“... sense and psychoanalysis tell us, what we think we know, what we imagine the signs are telling us. Marjorie Garber suggests, in this exhilarating book, that with the idea of fixed sexual identity, of being too knowingly male or female – terms, she remarks archly, ‘that overwhelmingly proclaim their own inadequacy’ – we may have got ourselves into ...”

“... and identity politics. Feminist theorists including Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Judith Butler, Marjorie Garber and Diana Fuss have called for more fluid work on questions of sexual difference which will address what Butler calls ‘gender trouble’. A number of recent studies focus on the radical potential of figures or practices at the borders of ...”

“... author, among other adventurous works, of Sodometrics: Renaissance Texts, Modern Sexualities, Marjorie Garber, a celebrated, good-humoured and energetic advocate of bisexuality, and Jonathan Dollimore, an English critic who shares some of these interests. Volumes so far published in the series include Men in Women’s Clothing, Anxious ...”

“... to criticise Baker and his team for leaving the theorising to cultural studies writers such as Marjorie Garber, but I believe that gay men have a particular contribution to make, and we shouldn’t be afraid of making it. In trying to bring us up to date with the latest undigested examples of cross-dressing, the book seems out of date already, with a ...”

“... and Wolfson evokes an interesting ambiguity in a remark by Paul de Man and its citation by Marjorie Garber. De Man writes of ‘making the death speak’, which in Garber’s quotation becomes ‘making the dead speak’. As Wolfson notes, the quotation has its logic and perhaps the original was a misprint. But ...”

“... comes out of a desire to save my soul.’ Four scholars were invited to reply to Coetzee – Marjorie Garber, Peter Singer, Barbara Smuts and Wendy Doniger – and all of them struggled in different ways to read his meanings. Singer seemed to suggest that Coetzee’s device was fundamentally evasive. ‘It’s a marvellous device, really. Costello ...”

“... the King into a condition which drew upon him the pity of the meanest peasant in his kingdom. What Marjorie Garber said last year in the LRB about sequels, that they sometimes have to undertake what Freud called ‘secondary revision’, a rearrangement of what we thought or imagined so that it fits what we now need to think and imagine, can equally well ...”