“... autism to be rare, homogeneous and totally debilitating: a form of psychosis that afflicted young children, sealing them off permanently from normal, loving relations with others and the world. Autism was seen as outside the realm of regular human functioning. When Oliver Sacks read Temple Grandin’s 1986 memoir, Emergence: Labelled Autistic, he ...”

“... with an unusually low cover price subsidised by her own royalties. She picked a picture by Robert Capa for the cover, a young man lying dead on a heap of rubble, and composed a line of text to run underneath it: ‘A scandal that has lasted ten thousand years’. Within a year of publication, the book had sold ...”

“... height in order to crack open its shell. Perhaps the beginnings of this thought had struck the young Aurora when she was doing her embroidery: she had been taught ‘The trick of Greek/And Latin’ by her father before he died. The young Elizabeth Barrett, too, was surrounded by classical texts at her father’s house in ...”

“... in love. What matters is that in the fifteen years since he died she has managed to wean her ‘young soul’ from its yearning after his. Or not quite. The poem concludes with Rosina’s admission that she still harbours a taste for ‘memory’s rapturous pain’, even though she knows that any further indulgence in it would exclude her for ever from the ...”

“... found work in a tailor’s shop. Two years after they arrived, he died of typhoid. A widow with a young child, Ann Trow Sommers moved to Chatham Street, a neighbourhood of cheap lodging houses and saloons, and took in laundry and mending work. She discovered that laundresses and seamstresses in America were no better paid than they had been in Painswick. The ...”

“... Welles sent detailed instructions for additional cuts, but they were ignored. An assistant editor, Robert Wise, was brought in to chop 30 more minutes out of the running time: half of the second half of the film. It was released on a double bill with Mexican Spitfire Sees a Ghost, and Welles was never again welcomed by the people in Hollywood with the money to ...”

“... drama narrated in the Sonnets and involving two personalities as well as the poet’s: the ‘fair young man’ and the ‘dark lady’. For a very long time – this approach still dominates at least the more conservative or biographical criticism – the Sonnets have been read as telling some kind of love story, the objects a man and a woman (Sonnets ...”

“... the judge decided treatment wouldn’t be helpful. He was sent down for 20 years. In 1613, a young German girl, Maria Ostertag of Ellwangen, came to the authorities, confessed that she was a witch and implicated 34 other people. She had copulated with Satan in horrific secret rituals – his penis, she said, was hard, cold and hurtful. She also claimed ...”

“... when I asked him which of the other artforms novel-writing was most like.) Lennon captures the young Mailer drinking gin to be more like Hemingway. He sees him smarting at his father’s addiction to gambling and shadow-boxing around Brooklyn impersonating Rocky Graziano. He doesn’t quite explain Mailer’s pugilistic kind of heroism, but he portrays ...”

“... Vendler to distort major figures helps her discriminate among lesser planets. Her inclusion of Robert Hayden, for example, is bold and welcome. Moreover, her promise to present writers ‘whole’ has more chance of being fulfilled with subsidiary figures. When Eliot judged anthologies less just to major than minor poets, he was, as often, lending his ...”

“... taken orders, Smith had gone as a gentleman’s tutor to Edinburgh, where he was welcomed by the young Turks of the Whig élite, with whom, in 1802, he founded the Edinburgh Review. Great wits don’t always readily agree, and there was another on the scene in the person of Henry Cockburn, whose career and reputation show several points of similarity with ...”

“... pre-Reformation who nobly gave his head to forces beyond his control. Most absurdly, because of Robert Bolt’s screenplay, this barrister of Catholic repression is widely envisioned as modernity’s diapason: the clear, strong note of individual conscience, sounding against the authoritarian intolerance of the Early Modern state. Thomas More died in ...”

“... The Spectator, once suavely edited, now serves as a fraternity house for Douglas Murray, Toby Young, James Delingpole and Rod Liddle; pummelling Muslims and high-fiving on Brexit, these right-wing bros are to the posh periodicals what Jeremy Clarkson was to the BBC. Murray’s book-length screed, The Strange Death of Europe, is full of Trump-style ...”

“... one that washes over you when you see flights advertised for 99p: something just isn’t right. Robert Greenwald’s documentary Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price makes a strong argument about what exactly is not right. It boils down to the question of just how Wal-Mart achieves its control of costs – a word which, in a business context, to a large ...”

“... Iwo Jima campaign, Flags of Our Fathers (2006). An old man is remembering his participation as a young marine in raising the Stars and Stripes on top of Mount Suribachi, a moment immortalised in another famous photograph, taken by Joe Rosenthal, perhaps the most reproduced photograph in American history. Late in his life, though, it is not Rosenthal’s 1945 ...”