“... 1486, was meant to be amusing as well as alarming. The Late Lancashire Witches, a play of 1634 by Thomas Heywood and Richard Brome, was both subversive comedy and topical commentary. In each case, the witches are female, their bodies corruptible, their passions unbridled. They mock and menace patriarchal political order (in The Late Lancashire Witches a ...”

“... World, represented ‘the final struggle of the two races – the decisive death grapple of the savage and the civilised man ... with all its immense results’. What Prescott, Leutze and the critics all had in mind was a struggle nearer home. In the 1840s the final surge of European settlers into California was taking place, and across the continent wars ...”

“... agonised poet? Will they help us to make sense of the courtier and friend of Charles II who wrote savage republican verse? All monarchs I hate, and the thrones they sit on, From the hector of France to the cully of Britain. What they will not do is to fulfil hopes perhaps raised by the word ‘unexpurgated’ in the publishers’ blurb. There are some ...”

“... It is like widows: the longer the old boy is gone the nicer he seems to have been. I think of Thomas Hardy’s first wife. They squabbled for years. He fell in love with another woman, wrote love poems about her. When the first died, and she really was a bit of a heap at the end (she wore boots), he married the second and started writing his love poems to ...”

“... the London property bubble burst in both private housing and the office sector, and the most savage recession in living memory settled over south-eastern England. London ceased to be a threat and became a crisis. The rhetoric of what Wright calls ‘Britain’s perestroika’ began to blow away and to reveal, once more, the endemic problems of the poor ...”

“... But The Tax Inspector is a much blacker novel than that, and several passages had me thinking of Thomas Harris – though Carey insists he has never read any of his novels. Benny’s hellish underground hideaway (‘The air was as thick as a laundry. The concrete floor was half an inch deep in water’) has distinct overtones of Jame Gumb’s basement in The ...”

“... epicene refinement of salon culture, he located ‘civil society’ amid the rugged manliness of savage life. However, this appreciation of a violent and close-knit world of tribal communities did not place him in a moral vacuum. Muscularity was intrinsic to Ferguson’s Christian vision, the free will of fallen man being an essential component of the divine ...”

“... Hammarskjöld floundering in a ‘United Nations’ organisation dominated by evil dictators with savage police forces. This is a strong ship-of-fools story, translated by Paul Britten Austin into good English which may have made Malte Moritz a touch more naively self-parodic than Sven Delblanc intended. From Canada comes a beautifully contrived set of ...”

“... away, and he turned suddenly towards me, looked straight at me, and said with what was an almost savage glare – “and we will! We will do anything.”’ Miss Gates does not include this quotation but she does speculate, in her somewhat repetitive afterword, on what might have happened to Churchill had his stirring rhetoric failed to prevail. He was ...”

“... woman is a frail thing and of weak discretion.’ ‘I like not a female Poetess at any hand,’ Thomas Powell writes in 1631. Rousseau in 1762 insists that ‘the entire education of women must be relative to men.’ And so on and so on and so on. Doesn’t even Chekhov’s treatment of the bookish wife niggle, in ‘Lady with Lapdog’? Why does he have to ...”

“... summer, began by placing him in the capacious context of such postwar avant-garde novelists as Thomas Bernhard, José Saramago and David Foster Wallace, only to acknowledge that, despite a shared affinity for ‘very long, breathing, unstopped sentences’, Krasznahorkai was ‘perhaps the strangest’ of them. The writer is ‘peculiar’; his work is ...”

“... but prim reply: ‘I am very glad to have escaped all that, like a slave who has escaped from a savage and tyrannical master.’ Old age, he says, brings freedom from desire; the true cause for complaint is not old age itself but the way people live. ‘If they are temperate and contented, old age . . . is only moderately onerous; if they aren’t, both ...”

“... introduces the McKeown thesis. In his now notorious The Modern Rise of Population (1976), Thomas McKeown proposed that in countries such as Britain population growth in recent centuries followed improvements in nutrition. Central to his thesis is the notion that better food reduced the mortality from infections, notably those like tuberculosis. This ...”

“... merge with nature into a ‘single field of relationships’. Drawing on evidence from the ‘savage’ (the word is Darwin’s) inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego to the Cree Indians of Northern Canada, Ingold explores the highly developed respect that hunter-gatherer societies have always held for animals, and the ways in which a variety of ...”

“... this score – he preferred ‘art from remote places’ (arts lointains) to bigoted terms like ‘savage’ – he too indulged in primitivist tropes. And although he insisted on the aesthetic value of tribal objects – in 1920, when they mostly remained in ethnographic museums, he organised a survey on ‘Arts from Remote Places’ with the subtitle ‘Will ...”