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“... Declaration, he encouraged Chipping Campden-like enterprises – Jerusalem Looms and Dome of the Rock Potteries. But here, as elsewhere, politics and history were too strong, and he resigned. In 1937, when Ashbee was making his last appearance at an Art Workers’ Guild meeting (looking like ‘Don Quixote, old, a little feeble, but undaunted’), Rex ...”

“... living, however eminent. Take Mike Newell, who wanted Rupert to do a bit of work for the role of David Blakely, the guy killed by Ruth Ellis, the last woman to be hanged in England. Newell wanted to see Rupert’s pain. But, as Rupert himself admits, he was ‘a riddle as an actor. On screen, I had a lot of “feeling” but I couldn’t really act. On stage ...”

“... point, of an artist’s work and then describing the impression that art makes on an open mind. (David Sylvester was especially good at this.) It has seldom generated a productive debate because it tends to be defensive, but also because there is such a fear of encouraging philistinism or of being mistaken for a philistine. Artists themselves have not always ...”

“... to exploit this insight. Since childhood he’s been a fan of another chameleon and shape-shifter, David Bowie, who was raised, like the author, in Bromley. Similarly, Kureishi’s next novel The Black Album was named after a bootleg LP by Prince to whom the main character, Shahid, is devoted. Prince plunders freely from various musical genres, from ...”

“... the survivors with machine-gun fire. More than two hundred were killed. The prime minister, David Ben Gurion, instructed Yigal Allon, the operation’s leader, to deport the surviving residents. Another commander, Yitzhak Rabin, issued the order: ‘The inhabitants of Lydda must be expelled quickly, without regard to age.’ These and other episodes of ...”

“... Cynthia Chase’s essay on Daniel Deronda, say, or Hillis Miller’s on Stevens’s ‘The Rock’ – and indicate its disability? Anthony Thorlby’s essay is an elaborate demonstration that Kafka’s stories are ‘structuralist’, in the sense that they present ‘structure as such’: hence their anxiety. ‘The anxiety which links so many ...”

“... the royal employ (Rowan Atkinson, in his Blackadder persona) schemes to stifle the Palace schlock-rock gig at its birth. But we – that is, we the People – know that his knavish tricks will be frustrated and that the mystic bond between Sovereign and People will be sealed through our shared devotion to the music of Ozzy Osbourne. To describe this as ...”

“... part. Here is a 1957 letter about their relationship from O’Hara to Ashbery, which appears in David Lehman’s useful The Last Avant Garde (1998): I don’t see any use in either of us going through the strain of pretending we like each other as much as we once did. I don’t know why, for instance, he has singled me out for the accusation that I’ve ...”

“... North Antrim constituency, the Giant’s Causeway, misinformed the public by telling them that the rock formation was 550 million years old. Despite such stories it would be a great mistake to pigeonhole Unionists as parochial know-nothings. Revisionist historians, most prominently Ian McBride and David Livingstone, have ...”

“... Therapy and all other conventional treatments for alcoholism, finding himself at what AA calls ‘rock bottom’ feeling he had nothing left to lose, Ameisen began doing research on addiction online, and stumbled on baclofen. He was so broke he couldn’t afford to buy the articles (his institutional subscriptions from Cornell and NYU had been cancelled when ...”

“... above the little town and as the miners made their way to their homes for lunch, a mass of mud and rock was dislodged. Lorroy, which was linked by a canal to the River Loing, a tributary of the Seine, suffered ‘total annihilation’ – or that was how the weekly L’Illustration captioned its photos of the scene. Seven people were killed and there were many ...”

“... a beautiful but fanciful map made by Mercator in 1569 that shows the North Pole as a large rock (an iron-rich mountain at the pole was one way of explaining why compass needles swung towards it) in the middle of an open sea surrounded by four islands with convenient channels between them. On Mercator’s map, there’s an obvious sea route from Europe ...”

“... cent of available water is used for the sole benefit of Israeli cities and settlements. At Camp David in 2000, when Ehud Barak negotiated the future of the Temple Mount compound with Arafat, Clinton favoured another ‘soft’ solution, giving Palestinians full sovereignty over the mosques on the Temple Mount, while Israel would have full sovereignty under ...”

“... the lines of Gilbert Adair’s The Death of the Author (1992). As a comic extravaganza it salutes David Lodge, whose character Morris Zapp gets a walk-on part. But for Binet, riffing knowingly on narrative theory isn’t an end in itself. As well as being a kind of allegory, and an elaborate joke, his conspiracy plot is a way of arranging non-fictional events ...”

“... with Dr Johnson a growing taste for history writing that eschewed the ‘huge canvasses’ of David Hume in favour of more intimate details ‘applicable to private life’, the emerging streets and houses and the evidence of ‘customs and manners’ which were at the same time both ancient and familiar, transformed the experience of visitors. Hamilton ...”