“... uncertainty not really found in the American poets often pervades Apollinaire’s acts of poetic self-naming, even in lines seemingly brimming with confidence: ‘Je lègue à l’avenir l’histoire de Guillaume Apollinaire’ (‘I bequeath to the future the story of Guillaume Apollinaire’). He was not just fatherless but divided in his national identity ...”

“... contrast, the sermons of Donne were marred, Eliot thought, by their proto-modernity, an excess of self-indulgent personalism. Donne, ‘the religious spell-binder . . . the flesh-creeper, the sorcerer of emotional orgy’, had about him the whiff of ‘impure motives’ and ‘facile success’. Interestingly, in developing this comparison, Eliot mobilised ...”

“... and ‘lesbo-Victorian’ are all terms Waters herself has used in self-description – though generally not all of them at once – and they are both accurate enough and unfair. The books are indeed pastiches: Victoriana as a queer theorist might perform it, with costumes by Judith Butler, prisons and madhouses by ...”

“... to become a highly successful advocate and legal adviser to the crown. He attached himself to Robert Devereux, second Earl of Essex, the dashing royal favourite, who championed his cause and urged the queen to make him her attorney-general. When that office fell to his rival Edward Coke, he set his sights on the solicitor-generalship, but with an equal ...”

“... as Belphoebe, Diana, a goddess supreme, never fully forgave him. Ralegh wrote a letter to Sir Robert Cecil from the Tower which was probably intended to be shown to the queen in order to win back her favour. The letter displays Ralegh at his best and worst. It’s a monstrous blast of self-pity, tempered by his ...”

“... dramatic events of the conflict: the battle of Teruel, when he, Hemingway and the photographer Robert Capa accompanied Republican forces during their heady initial victories; the siege of Barcelona, where ‘I and a million others saw things which Dante could not have imagined’; the Ebro fighting, when Hemingway saved Matthews’s life by preventing his ...”

“... date. As I described in the LRB on 13 April 2000, the economists Fischer Black, Myron Scholes and Robert Merton drew on the log-normal distribution (and on a number of other assumptions about market conditions) to reduce the complicated problem of understanding the prices of options to a relatively simple differential equation. The work, published in ...”

“... 11 short pieces called ‘The Payne Whitney Poems’. The Payne Whitney, I knew from reading about Robert Lowell, was a New York mental hospital, in the same way I knew from reading Lunar Caustic that the Bellevue was a New York mental hospital, and here was a clutch of texts fit to set beside Malcolm Lowry’s book, or Lowell’s ‘Waking in the Blue’ or ...”

“... of her first novel, Wise Blood. Her friend Sally Fitzgerald, the wife of the poet and translator Robert Fitzgerald, broke the news, which effectively terminated all dreams of escaping Andalusia, the farm outside Milledgeville run by her mother. There O’Connor spent the last 12 years of her life, raising peacocks and writing ferocious stories populated by ...”

“... walks a tightrope between remote media, genres and historical periods in a chapter that compares Robert Louis Stevenson’s short story ‘The Bottle Imp’ (1891) with David Robert Mitchell’s zombie film It Follows (2014). The former was published a year after the sovereign debt crisis brought about by the insolvency of ...”

“... wife, Anne of Bohemia, he may not have desired her sexually. His favourite and probable lover, Robert de Vere, also stayed childless through two marriages. Richard may have taken perverse comfort in his failure to beget a successor because it made him seem indispensable. Two hundred years later, another childless monarch, Elizabeth I, had John Hayward ...”

“... as part of a management plan. Once reintroduced, though, they might show signs of being a bit self-willed: white-tailed eagles have an eight-foot wingspan. Recently, one took a flight round the Asda car park in Dunfermline. People were so alarmed they called the police.If there’s a breath of wild at Asda, in the furthest flung places you might find ...”

“... of rabbis and licensed moneylenders to the Habsburg emperors, and remained contemptuous of her self-made financier husband. She had been brought up in Vienna, for which, like many similarly placed ladies from the provinces, she yearned throughout her life. To annoy her and as a sign of protest against her attempts to cultivate a Viennese salon in ...”

“... a more generous view of Carl Schorske’s Fin-de-Siècle Vienna (1980), or indeed Robert Musil’s The Man without Qualities, might have yielded a more abundant answer. On the other hand, Freud’s warm if critical admiration of England (which, he shared, incidentally, with members of the Viennese Jockey Club), his remarkable command of ...”

“... like the rest.* Maybe. But no other writer in this field so regularly startles one into self-recognition. We skitter anxiously from cradle to grave like a tart between lamp-posts. I won’t make you feel bad so long as you don’t make me feel bad. That is the social contract. And there is nothing much to be done about it. Goffman’s work, as he ...”