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“... rare-book rooms, bags are searched for food, pens are confiscated, hands are gloved. And as H.J. Jackson pointed out in Marginalia: Readers Writing in Books, one result of the growth in the number of ‘career library books’ that remain in reading-rooms from which drink or even ink is excluded is that we are left with a thinner record of ...”

“... enables Bibliophobia’s signature trait, which is its rapid vaulting across centuries of mark-making. Take the short span between pages 28 and 35. Cummings notes that in the Heroides, Ovid’s rewriting of Homer’s Odyssey, Penelope writes Ulysses a letter, saying don’t write back, just come. This relationship between writing and presence takes us ...”

“... the wrong end of a brush. As recently as the early 1980s, you can find Twombly making his first mark – the letters ‘HRIH’, a spoked wheel, a set of indeterminate forms – then submerging it, almost but not quite completely, in circular scrawls of crimson and black crayon. There’s a barely controlled abandon, and more than a hint of anxiety that ...”

“... contender is Chicago 1893. After more than a century, the gleaming White City on the fairway at Jackson Park lingers in the American mind. Its image launched the international ‘city beautiful’ movement and transformed Washington. It has bequeathed its bright nickname to a Tube station and its shabby surroundings in West London. The most strapping of its ...”

“... of Ferrytown. One of them is Franklin Lopez, a young man travelling east with his older brother, Jackson – they are unaware that they have been named after grand old men of American history. They have left their mother behind on the family farm, and hope to be taken by ship, once they reach the coast, to a better life across the ocean. But if this is what ...”

“... based on the deal that I had signed with Andrew under duress … The head of the record company [Mark Dean of Innervision] turns up with these contracts and we go to this greasy spoon café and he says: ‘Look, if you don’t sign this now, the deal is going away, you won’t have finished demos to take away with you, you won’t own them.’ We were on our ...”

“... started without a Best and Dr Benito, the press secretary in Scoop, was originally Bonham Carter Jackson. Brideshead is much altered. Charles Ryder began as Peter Fenwick and was then in Debrett, the second son of a second baronet: ‘Very obscure,’ says Sebastian, whose sister was not at first Cordelia, but Bridget, the name of Waugh’s devout ...”

“... wrested political access to pop culture from the Democrats. Reagan overstepped the mark in 1984, however, when he tried to appropriate Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Born in the USA’ as the anthem of his re-election campaign, having failed to pay attention either to the song’s lyrics (which are kind of ironic) or to the general thrust of ...”

“... In​ a collection of essays published in 2005 to mark four hundred years since the Gunpowder Plot, Antonia Fraser imagined Elizabeth Stuart being crowned as Queen Elizabeth II in January 1606. ‘The Gunpowder Plot Succeeds’ describes the plotters’ confessed intention, in the chaos following the death of James VI and I in the explosion at Westminster, of abducting his eldest daughter from her governor’s home in Warwickshire ...”

“... millions of people waiting for her to land.’ The word ‘cunt’ is practically a punctuation mark in these outbursts; the language of online shaming is overwhelmingly misogynistic. Women are subjected to fantasies of rape and sexual violence while men escape with character assassination. When Jonah Lehrer, a staff writer at the New Yorker, was caught ...”

“... a record label, bought the movie rights. The subsequent film, which starred Diana Ross and Michael Jackson, as well as Richard Pryor and Lena Horne, was a commercial and critical flop. But it became classic holiday viewing for many Black Americans, including my family. The Wiz is set in late 1970s New York, dingy and rundown, full of dilapidated tenements of ...”

“... book about it. With trained military skill they camouflage their identity on the dust-jacket: Bill Jackson and Dwin Bramall they call themselves, for all the world as if they were just reporters on the Sunday Times. Then on the title-page they unmask their batteries, and we find that we are actually in the hands of General Sir William ...”

“... in architecture, but country houses manage to secure a much wider, even popular, audience. Mark Girouard’s Life in the English Country House has actually become a best-seller – extraordinary in the field of architectural history – and its unprecedented success has encouraged Yale to issue as a companion volume a new edition of his earlier The ...”

“... are quickly negated by the overwhelming fecundity of tropical nature. ‘The company left no more mark on the jungle than a ship’s wake on the sea,’ Marlantes writes. Advanced technology is repeatedly undone by weather and topography: fixed-wing aircraft are useless in the highlands, and helicopters are vulnerable to hidden sniper and artillery ...”

“... crew of green-growthers, including financiers such as the former governor of the Bank of England Mark Carney, economists including Per Espen Stoknes of the Norwegian Business School and Mariana Mazzucato of University College London, and business gurus like Paul Hawken (co-author, with Hunter and Amory Lovins, of Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next ...”