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“... Tippett was using an electric guitar, keyboard and drum kit to pump the liberating funk of jazz, rock and blues through his tightly constructed score.Tippett’s work gleefully upended assumptions about the music Great English Composers ought to be writing, and implied that British new music – equally suspicious of European modernism and anything ...”

“... black-loaded brush, dragging a jagged stuttery line almost from top to bottom. That was to be the rock edge of Etna’s crater. Where the volcanic glow was to fall, Rosa slapped on a queasy mid-tone mix of sienna and smalt blue; capped it with brisk blurts of white; later, knocked the resulting rock planes back into ...”

“... when an evil scam, Operation Wildlife, which seeks to snatch an Islamic terrorist on or off the Rock of Gibraltar, disastrously fails, with consequences which eventually enable you to identify the opposing sides, Smiley’s people, as it were, and their enemies. On one side is a country which consists of charming, sometimes simple souls, Toby Bell of the ...”

“... announces: ‘Sir, there’s an unruly mob to see you.’ Or when, in the movie, the members of a rock band on a sinking raft suddenly drop their guitars and pick up violins, so they can play ‘Nearer My God to Thee’ as they go under. But the movie doesn’t have any of the really inspired moments that mark certain of the episodes, and perhaps ...”

“... 5000 novels 0.001 per cent of the material was about sex; 0.003 per cent was drugs, 0.001 per cent rock ’n’ roll. Sex doesn’t sell after all, and takes up twice as much space in non-bestsellers as it does in bestsellers. In fact what matters isn’t so much the subject itself as the proportions in which a novel’s subjects appear. A third of John ...”

“... like subject rulers in an Assyrian relief, or when Mary Magdalene is made to seem part of the rock on which the cross is raised. ‘Christ Carrying the Cross’ Delacroix was appalled by this evocation of Giotto and Ravenna. Writing in his journal in 1855 after a visit to the Exposition Universelle, he expressed enthusiasm for British painting – for ...”

“... Throughout his life, John Betjeman used avuncular charm and boundless enthusiasm to disguise a rock-sized chip on his shoulder: his lack of a university degree. He was diffident about having a father in trade, displeased with his public school (Marlborough), disappointed in his failure at Oxford (ironically enough, because he couldn’t pass the compulsory ...”

“... to Sabine Rewald, by two sepia drawings of his studio windows with the River Elbe beyond by Caspar David Friedrich. The drawings are exact in their rendering of casements, panes and the gradation of light on bare walls, and careful in their delineation of the distant riverbank. The frugal medium and the impersonal quality of the draughtsmanship give you the ...”

“... David Reubeni​ posed a puzzle to contemporaries; he still poses one today. The Mediterranean world was turbulent in the early decades of the 16th century. The Ottoman Empire toppled the Mamluks in 1517, giving the sultan control over Egypt, Syria and much of the Arabian Peninsula; Western Christian rulers feared that they might be next ...”

“... accrued nonetheless. Geologists have understood since the 17th century that sedimentary layers of rock and soil mark the passage of time, the youngest layers at the top, the oldest at the bottom, and that sometimes geological forces will push up a slice of the world that contains several aeons’ worth of fossil-rich strata, which we can read like the lines ...”

“... Nastassia Kinski as their wives. For Wenders, a long-time lover of the Western and of American rock music, it was, as he has since told the French magazine Positif, the closing of a circle, the completion of his preoccupation with the USA. The last piece in his (embarrassingly titled) Emotion Pictures is a long, troubled free-verse meditation on ‘The ...”

“... to be free of consequences only for those at the top of the social pile – kings, aristocrats, rock stars (‘We piss anywhere, man,’ as the monarchical Mick Jagger once said). The world of the Iliad is not just one of vehement passions but one of death – continual, and described in horrible detail. This is why Norbert Elias saw the pacification and ...”

“... factory somewhere downstate, Clinton is confronted by a host of questions about his Little Rock love-nest. He looks like a dog being washed. Since I don’t care about Flowers, I attempt to change the subject – never an easy thing to do at a pack-job press conference. I want to know about the execution of Ricky Ray Rector. Rector was a black ...”

“... magical castle jail, with its high turrets and gothic battlements’. ‘There is a story,’ Paul Rock writes in Reconstructing a Women’s Prison (1996), ‘that its façade [was intended] … to mollify suburban neighbours unhappy about the construction of a prison in the midst of their new-built homes.’ When an execution took place, crowds would gather ...”

“... Holocaust since the end of the 1980s (the first intifada), and its return into Hebrew literature (David Grossman’s See under: Love). The Holocaust is part of the victim imagery, hence the madness of state-subsidised school trips to Auschwitz. This has less to do with understanding the past than with reproducing an environment in which we exist in the ...”