“... Captain Thompson – ‘motionless, remote and enigmatical’ – piled on the agony with fog, a lee-shore and a lost anchor cable, Conrad explained that he would ‘back the bow anchor and tail the heaviest hawser on board on the end of the chain before letting go, and if she parted from that, which is quite likely, I would just do nothing. She would have ...”

“... while the arduous labour of mastering the language discouraged young men from getting wenches with child, wronging the ancientry, and other delinquencies lamented by Shakespeare’s Old Shepherd. Even the Chinese mode of consuming alcohol was so well controlled that hangovers were virtually unknown. The large numbers of male prostitutes in evidence called for ...”

“... ones above and the smallest below.’ This is typical. Absolutely precise and sensible, but with a child’s intensity and close-up. Aksakov (1791-1859) published his book in 1847, then produced a ‘considerably enlarged’ version in 1854. It was his earliest venture into print (he had started to go blind and had retired early from government service), and ...”

“... with royalists, and indeed fell in love with one of them, Annette Vallon, the mother of his first child, whose counter-revolutionary activities are recorded in surviving police archives. Personal connection isn’t the same as political conviction, but by the time of the September Massacres of 1792, Wordsworth was clearly questioning his early enthusiasm for ...”

“... café where the tiny, deaf Adolf Loos (‘ornament is crime’) held court; he knew Man Ray and Lee Miller; Berthold Lubetkin lived in the same building; he was good friends with the photographers Andor Kertész and Bill Brandt as well as most of the leading painters and sculptors. But an enduring sense of his own superiority (as a ...”

“... say, between father-in-law and daughter-in-law – while others are tales of paedophilia and ‘child molestation’. Another popular subject of which Delhi residents will be well aware are the crimes committed by the ‘criminal castes’, often linked in the neocolonial imagination of the city’s bourgeoisie to the villages and smallholdings that are ...”

“... next to me in United economy? A pretty polyester twin-set? Diamantine best friends? A husband? A child? Panty hose? A tolerance for abuse? Sequinned nipple pasties? The lipstick on the corpse? All of the above? Tomboy no good. Tomboy pathetic. One had somehow imbibed the message early on. One was not complete (whatever that meant) and never would be. For ...”

“... tour in Denmark in June 1965 contacted the Stones office ... saying she had just given birth to my child. I consulted my diaries and found she was two months out with her calculations, and her arithmetic was politely corrected. Nothing further,’ Wyman is pleased to confirm, ‘was ever heard from her’. He is also concerned to share a month-by-month check ...”

“... The horrifying nature of these statistics is compounded by the case-histories they conceal. Henry Lee Lucas, subject of the film Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, is currently on death row in Texas. He claims to have murdered 360 people across a range of states in the American South; the Police claim to have verified 160 of these killings: both claims have ...”

“... self-denial enforced on women in patriarchal society. Not only does she show Sibella, innocent child of the forest, freely ‘giving’ herself to the worldly Clement, she has her defend the union – which will result in pregnancy and her death in childbirth – with a strikingly Wollstonecraftian appeal to natural law. Society’s petty rules do not ...”

“... loyalty to the agencies. Whoever was going to accept responsibility for what happened at the Child Support Agency, it was not going to be the ministers who designed an institution fundamentally flawed at its inception. Whatever their functional defects, the agencies (and the quangos) nevertheless serve their purpose of depoliticising executive authority ...”

“... Bess Lomax, the children of America’s most distinguished folk-music scholars. Woody Guthrie and Lee Hays had regional middle-class roots; the songwriter Millard Lampell was the child of immigrant Jewish garment workers. Providing themselves with invented proletarian pedigrees or Southern backgrounds, the group performed ...”

“... it was possible for people to redeem themselves by their own efforts. The followers of Mother Anne Lee, Joseph Smith and John Humphrey Noyes were all, in different ways, antinomian perfectionists who considered themselves free to challenge or abandon existing norms (particularly sexual ones) and to create new ones based on their own idiosyncratic readings of ...”

“... all the rest of it. This is perhaps a trifle unfair to the good work done previously by Hermione Lee and Victoria Glendinning, to name but two more orthodox critics: but it does indeed help – and very strikingly – to remove Bowen from the socially feminine personality on which her admirers used fondly to dote, and see how far she can run without her ...”

“... in English at Cambridge; in Italy she was educated mostly by her parents. She said later that as a child she had assumed she would grow up to be a boy, and her fiction touches on themes of gender fluidity. Her novel of 1923, Told by an Idiot, was compared to Orlando. In these pieces the tone is closer to The Waves. Her six brothers and sisters, to whom ...”