“... are poets and professors of poetry, and the authors of a previous collaboration, Edgelands, which took as its subject the dejected spaces that buffer suburban developments, industrial parks, highways and airports. They have now teamed up for a second book of psychogeography, describing their pilgrimages to the sites of poets’ deaths (but not their ...”

“... who did not want any more children, but these were entirely private and so have gone unrecorded. John Christopoulos has meticulously pieced together a secret history not only from prescriptive sources but from the public records of trials, giving us for the first time a sense of the way early modern women and men experienced abortion. Trials inevitably ...”

“... I lose my Drag Race virginity. Season 14 was midway through; over the course of two evenings, he took me through the first seven episodes, each an hour long.Back on my own sofa, I returned to Season 1, first broadcast in 2009. I cantered through to the Season 5 finale. Over the next twelve months, I watched all fifteen seasons of US Drag Race, then all ...”

“... story. The colonies’ instinctive British loyalties counterbalanced suspicion and mistrust; it took sustained, deliberate effort from Adams between the mid-1760s and mid-1770s to transform protest into outrage, then militancy, and finally a willingness to shed blood for an as yet unimagined American nation. Abetted by London’s misunderstandings of ...”

“... use his leg muscles again – ‘to tense the quadriceps’, to feel again that earlier power that took him to Norway, that took him to the bull. And it is gone. It’s being gone also allows Sacks to reconnect himself to his internal account of the history of neurology, since he has become a sufferer from Babinski’s ...”

“... was sustained by the use of strategies including the exposure of unwanted infants. Christianity took shape in part by reacting against the values of the age, in part by internalising them. Christians across the ages have put an awful lot of effort into avoiding sex altogether. Celibacy wasn’t particularly prized in the ancient world, but in ...”

“... Scott sentimentality to summon, with bicycle imagery, projections of an England that never was. John Major, a gap-year, work experience prime minister, sleepwalking through the job, as a profile-raising photo opportunity between serious employment in the banking and conference-addressing industries, blundered into a reprise of Orwell’s cycling ...”

“... We started reading Emma soon after the sirens took over our evenings and sometimes our nights. Their expectation was worse than their whine and from the first waning of the winter light in the late afternoon you found yourself nervously gobbling chocolate or peanuts or anything just to fill that pulsating, dark hole where your stomach used to be ...”

“... which his talents were quite futile. Listen to Callaghan himself, describing his feelings as he took office as Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1964, after Labour had won an election in peacetime conditions, when no one was out of work: ‘In all the offices I have held I have never experienced anything more frustrating than sitting at the Chancellor’s desk ...”

“... he was always a storyteller for boys, in the tradition (a very good one) of R.L. Stevenson and John Buchan. In A Sort of Life, which was as near to an autobiography as he was ever prepared to go (and itself the result of psychotherapy for a period of writer’ block), Greene tells how he first came to keep a record of his dreams. Though it’ not at all ...”

“... was largely a third Bill Clinton term: Rahm Emanuel, Lawrence Summers, Tom Donilon, Leon Panetta, John Podesta and Hillary Clinton were called back and held over. The interlude of subsequent personal enrichment by Clinton, trading on her prestige and inside knowledge, has drawn attention in recent days, after the revelation of her large speaking fees on Wall ...”

“... the novels of Dickens and Eliot. (It was only later that Zola would join his personal canon.) He took from the great Victorian novelists that his was an age that pushed individuals into small dark corners, insignificant socially but emotionally huge, and that to illuminate these local recesses was to begin the crucial task of compassion and ...”

“... wrongful conviction for sexual assault, Avery went back to jail. In ten hours of television that took almost ten years to produce, Moira Demos and Laura Ricciardi minutely reconstruct the investigation of Halbach’s death. In particular, their series explores the possibility that the police framed Steven Avery for the killing and obtained a false confession ...”

“... comes only, in Salome, with death. The Climax shows Salome holding up the severed head of John the Baptist to look him in the eyes, beside the lines: ‘J’ai baisé ta bouche Iokanaan/J’ai baisé ta bouche.’ Below and between the two a phallic lily rises. The Art Journal found Beardsley’s work upsetting, ‘terrible in its weirdness’, full ...”

“... for Christ to be tied to, it is without fluting. A rusticated arch in the late Beheading of St John and the manger in a Nativity are unclear. Clouds supporting angels and broad swathes of drapery may make strong patterns against these backgrounds, but even the angels seem to be contained in the same shallow space as the other figures.Photographers and ...”