“... tail is darker, greenish and emerges from a dark blue body that possesses a fourth head, charcoal-black and ugly as a troll’s. There are allusions here to the Ouroboros – the snake that eats its tail, a common motif in alchemical art, signifying the union of opposites – and to the process by which the philosopher’s stone was supposed to be ...”

“... since come out as trans.) Apocalypse World (2010) adopts a dystopian setting like that of the Mad Max films. Creators have since adopted its dice-based rule set – simpler than the elaborate system of D&D – for other milieux, from Monsterhearts, a high-school romance-horror hybrid (think Buffy the Vampire Slayer) to Pasión de las Pasiones (think ...”

“... a Hampshire house so haunted it was knocked down. He gives a deft sketch of the original Woman in Black: Maria Manning, the Lady Macbeth of Bermondsey, who was sent to the gallows in a black dress and long gloves for killing her lover and burying him under the kitchen floor (‘I never liked him and I beat his skull with a ...”

“... his village about a dream in which the dead of battle rise from their makeshift graves in a great black cloud and walk the roads and byways of France. (A still photograph from the film, showing a lone soldier among a field of crosses receding without end to the horizon, forms the book’s dust-jacket.) The risen soldiers see how little their sacrifice has ...”

“... real. The book’s ostensible sumptuousness is now revealed as a strength. On page 193 there is a black-and-white reproduction of a little watercolour dating from 1812 showing ‘Princess Schwarzenburg Reading in the Austrian Embassy, Paris’. Praz tells you that the original watercolour is one of a pair now kept in the confiscated Schwarzenburg castle of ...”

“... thanks to the only avant-garde journal of the time, Angry Penguins. Angry Penguins was edited by Max Harris, a student at Adelaide University, and John Reed, who was 10 years Harris’s senior and lived just outside Melbourne. Independently wealthy, Reed was committed to sponsoring any form of artistic originality that caught his eye; on meeting the ...”

“... In this circle, or set of interlocking circles, the names of Rudolf Slansky, Ehrlich and Alter, Max Schachtman, Andres Nin, Amadeo Bordiga and John Dewey are, still, names with which to puncture an argument, break up a friendship, revise an article or inaugurate a new and daring small magazine. Keywords include ...”

“... still in the Habsburg Empire. As a young man publishing his first poems, he sat in cafés with Max Brod, Franz Kafka, Egon Erwin Kisch, Milena Jesenská and Willy Haas. He served in the Austro-Hungarian army in the First World War, ending up in Vienna, where he graduated to the intellectual hothouse of the Café Central and, in 1915, was introduced to Alma ...”

“... New England in 1780, which shows the three stages of woman, with a cradle, a bed and a coffin (a black maid holds the baby). Emin is a chronicler of women’s rites of passage, and for all the haunting presence/absence of men in her work, she conveys truly passionate attachments to women. In that first blanket, Hotel International (the name of her father’s ...”

“... Rohde’s Psyche: The Cult of Souls and the Belief in Immortality among the Greeks (1894) and Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905). What these works had in common was their attempt to analyse religion as a social process. They presented religious practice as continuous with other forms of normative social activity, liable ...”

“... is needed. The favourite devices they fall back on seem to be amnesia, cosmetic surgery, and ‘black science’, involving cloning, brainwashing, mind-theft, memory-abuse and personality-swapping. The fruitfulness of these made-over traditional themes and motifs can be seen in her analysis of Random Harvest (1942), Duplicates (1992), and Total Recall ...”

“... years before she exhibited Ma Gouvernante at her first solo show, Oppenheim began an affair with Max Ernst. She was 20, studying art in Paris; he was 44. His wife, the painter Marie-Berthe Aurenche, was 29. The shoes were Aurenche’s, a second-hand gift from Ernst to Oppenheim, who bound and plated them. After the exhibition ended, she sent the piece to the ...”

“... Kawakami Otojiro. He had just completed a tour of Europe, where he had hoodwinked the critics – Max Beer-bohm among them – into believing that his renderings of plays like The Warrior and the Geisha (his wife played the geisha) were Kabuki masterpieces. Back in Tokyo, Kawakami’s Hamlet took the stage riding a bicycle. This, the Kabuki scholar Earle ...”

“... on the fuss about gay marriage, and ‘Christmas’, which details the casual ripping-off of a black roofer by his colleagues and was originally published as an autobiographical essay, these stories make up the most explicitly political section of the book, which is organised under rubrics drawn from an imaginary ‘Taskbook for the New Nation’. The ...”

“... then of herself as an angel on the outside but a fiend within, and later spoke of her fits of black depression – confirmed by others – that included a ‘swollen awkward feeling’ dating from childhood. She and her fertility had survived, but her psyche was clearly shaken, and her personality took its definitive shape. Her brother reports that ...”