“... 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 ...”

“... up as a boy in real life. When she was 17 she wrote a verse drama on the life and death of Thomas Chatterton: dressed in a white shirt and a pair of black breeches (run up for her in secret by Emily her maid), she would act it out alone in the attic at Knole and every time be ‘moved to tears’ by her own performance. Twenty years later, in a ...”

“... at right angles to the trunk’. These are the words of the police doctor summoned to the scene, Thomas Bond. It was the morning of Friday, 9 November 1888, and Kelly had just become – at a conservative estimate – the fifth and final victim of the serial killer known as Jack the Ripper. The positioning of the victim’s body is consistent with the other ...”

“... at the door. This was the poem, ‘Fin de Fête’, which in 1916 attracted the attention of Thomas Hardy and convinced him of Charlotte Mew’s talent. Hardy, of course, didn’t need to be persuaded that the Spirit of the Universe was exacting, and Charlotte had the kind of temperament that accepted this without question, even in the nursery. In 1882 ...”

“... not suddenly abandon the old ways of studying barbarism. In the works of Antoine-Yves Goguet and Thomas Carte, old-time post-Diluvial antiquarianism and modern stadial sociology coexist quite happily. Pocock never forgets that Gibbon – notwithstanding his sophistication, his scepticism and his raillery at the expense of Christianity – had ‘a continuing ...”

“... the Golden Legend itself. Paradoxically, the point is not so much pain as the lack of it: however savage their tortures, the saints do not scream in agony but persist in prayer, impervious. Stretched on the rack, St Agatha exults: ‘I delight in these pains … as one who has found great treasures.’ After her breasts are cut off, St Peter heals them (over ...”

“... though he didn’t make the most successful film made according to Dogme principles, which was Thomas Vinterberg’s Festen – wasn’t really a vow of chastity but of poverty, since any film made according to the principles would come in cheap. Disowning the kitsch manipulativeness of Hollywood style was a strategic way of claiming the moral high ground ...”

“... Mary Arden, his mother, arguing that Shakespeare was a shaman who witnessed to the ‘prolonged, savage persecution and threatened extermination of the old Catholic tribe’. This tier of his argument leads Hughes to suggest with uncharacteristic hesitation that ‘in so far as he was a shaman of that type ... he was indeed not merely crypto-Catholic but ...”

“... was remarkable more for the breadth of his interests, which ran from the political programme of Thomas Cromwell to medieval English sculpture, than for the novelty of his methods. In the mesolithic period, associated with Princeton and the 1960s, he was enthusiastic about the social sciences and adopted some of their methods and much of their language. He ...”

“... in World War Two, a lengthy and somewhat mawkish critical assessment of the American radical poet Thomas McGrath (whose work ‘will be remembered in one hundred years when many more fashionable voices have been forgotten’), another, better tribute to C. Wright Mills, snatches of Thompson’s own, unimpressive poetry, and, apparently, virtually everything ...”

“... of our own condition.’ Suicide holds sway; Al Alvarez, quoting Yeats, famously called it a ‘savage god’. It demands attention, simply as subject matter, and of course in Vann’s case even more so, because we know it’s not merely subject matter, not just a story: this stuff, in some way, is about his life and his father’s life. (All characters in ...”

“... officers in England, viz: watching fishes swim under the bridge, throwing stones at pigs etc’; Thomas Munro, an officer in the Madras section of the East India Company army, swapped his dreams of ‘looking down from my elephant, invested in my royal garments’ for the reality of ‘walking in an old coat, and a ragged shirt, in the noonday sun’. ‘I ...”

“... It comes as a surprise, then, to learn of Henry’s sociable and venturesome youth. His father, Thomas Gosse, was an unsuccessful miniaturist, who made a shaky living by wandering the country and producing portraits on demand. His outspoken wife, Hannah, formerly a lady’s maid, was the real hub of the family. She was determined to educate her sons ...”

“... new science of anthropology, was hooked on notions of evolutionary progress among humans – the savage, the primitive and the barbarous eventually evolving into civilised bourgeois ‘man’. On this ladder, Africans, like other non-Europeans, occupied the lower rungs, and anthropology’s interest in them was, as Edward Tylor put it, ‘that savages and ...”

“... shows that she heard a good deal at Il Palmerino in 1899 about its owner’s recent and savage falling-out with Bernard Berenson over accusations that she had stolen his ideas and published them as her own. (There was some truth in this: Berenson had discussed his ideas over the stewed tongue at the villa but had not expected them to appear ...”