“... A penis in pickle, and a dreadful wife made to vanish into another dimension by means of an esoteric yoga pose. A narrator who rapes and murders his wife, gratified that the two climaxes coincide (‘I came as she died. That much I can say with pride. I know her death was a moment of intense pleasure to her’). When he wakes up he vomits on the corpse, a reflex of horror and remorse that amounts to a further assault ...”

“... who gained international notoriety, mostly through celebrated trials: Huey Newton, Bobby Seale, David Hilliard, Eldridge Cleaver, Kathleen Cleaver, Ericka Huggins, Elaine Brown. But rather than focusing on the sensationalist and salacious aspects of the party’s history – the confrontations, violence, criminality – Bloom and Martin choose to recount ...”

“... scarcely conveys the tense atmosphere as soldiers struggled to find a way across the river by any means; nor does he speculate on their state of mind, caught perhaps between a realisation that becoming a POW made good sense, and a desire to defend the homeland – already a landscape of bombed ruins – at all costs. More might have been saved from the ...”

“... to create a disciplined workforce and to the ways slaves resisted his demands. He was ‘by no means an easy man to work for’. He insisted that slaves and hired workers adhere to his own highly demanding work ethic. ‘I expect my people,’ he wrote to one overseer, ‘will work from daybreaking until it is dusk,’ a regimen which in summer, as ...”

“... The folds of gold satin fall elegantly around the body and the balance of Van Dyck’s composition means our gaze is drawn to the black sash tied just off-centre at the queen’s waist; crucially, below that, her hands are joined in a cradling gesture over her abdomen. She seems to offer her womb to the viewer: a royal pregnancy is after all a public ...”

“... to suffer. Retributive justice was important, but the caliphate also encouraged loyalty by other means. Tamimi has translated the lyrics of dozens of anasheed – patriotic anthems written and recorded by the state’s Ajnad Foundation for Media Production. They vary in quality. Removing the ‘stain of humiliation’ is a common theme, as are the glories ...”

“... when he sang, ‘He’ll sure write his name up and down your back,’ House replied: ‘That means beat you up.’) Seth plays the song to Carter; they both find it ‘mesmerising’. They stay up until six in the morning, ‘cleaning up the recording and deciphering the words’, filtering out the background noise until they have ‘a clear a ...”

“... he was a child (we are told), but had scant interest in what he might do with it should he get it. David Cameron explained that he wanted to be prime minister ‘because I think I’d be good at it’, but this is something Johnson has never maintained about himself. The evidence to the contrary is already accumulating rapidly. And yet, there he ...”

“... Barry Hannah, Diane Williams and Mary Robison.One of the best accounts of Lish’s influence is in David Leavitt’s roman à clef Martin Bauman; Or, a Sure Thing. He appears in the first paragraph of the first chapter disguised as Stanley Flint, a creative writing teacher and human resources nightmare:Wild rumours circulated about this seminar. It was said ...”

“... unbreakable spirit to win! Fighting the Hun with pepper? Was that something that Jimmy Perry and David Croft, the fecund scriptwriters of Dad’s Army, dreamed up in a dizzy moment? Not so. Charles Graves, an early historian of the Home Guard, refers to a unit which suggested in orders that any rudimentary weapons ‘could be usefully supplemented by a ...”

“... the register of the internment centre Les Tourelles, a former colonial infantry barracks. ‘J’ means Jewish. Drancy is the name of the camp where these 17-year-old girls were sent, and from where most of them proceeded to Auschwitz. In the face of all this, the very idea of a search warrant begins to seem too orderly, and too sane, a memory of another ...”

“... to be added to spore suspensions to stop them clumping when they are prepared and dried, but as David Henderson from Porton Down said in 1952, in a journal to be found in any medical school library, ‘fortunately many substances added to the suspension will prevent clumping. The simplest and most effective that has been found is sodium alginate used in ...”

“... nor is there any discussion of the difficulty of tracking changes in emotional life by means of a new genre whose appearance is said to coincide with those changes. Since there are no 17th-century domestic novels to use as comparisons, how would we know if the late 18th century’s novels are registering new phenomena? The marriage plot, the ...”

“... chose to file a libel suit against Grunewald. What followed turned into the political trial of David Ben-Gurion and his party, to which Kastner belonged. Grunewald was acquitted. Kastner, the German-born judge wrote, ‘had sold his soul to the devil’. In Zertal’s view this was the beginning of Ben-Gurion’s downfall. Worn out by the scandal, he ...”

“... use of tax havens by virtually every major global bank and multinational business has nullified David Ricardo’s doctrine of comparative advantage. Fundamentalist advocates of a no-holds-barred approach to free trade have persistently turned a blind eye to this problem. For those like Baker – and myself – who believe that free and fair trade can ...”