“... in the provision of public services) experienced by trans people on a daily basis. Half of young trans people and a third of adult trans people attempt suicide. The report singles out the recent deaths in custody of two trans women, Vicky Thompson and Joanne Latham, and the case of Tara Hudson, a trans woman who was placed in a men’s prison, as ...”

“... the Paris Review, McSweeney’s and the New Yorker. He is also a journalist, specialising, like David Foster Wallace, in first-person-singular expeditions into curious reaches of American culture. Tower’s non-fiction adventures have included a bicycle odyssey along the New Orleans levee a year after Hurricane Katrina, a search for a possibly extinct ...”

“... in the frame include Alan Beith, Vince Cable, Frank Field, Alan Haselhurst, Ann Widdecombe, George Young and, most remarkable of all, John Bercow, who many on our side favour as a way of getting back at the Tories. I should also report that one other wildly improbable name has been mentioned: moi. ‘Mr Speaker Mullin,’ Nick Robinson called as I was on the ...”

“... when, on his return to the wartime capital of Chongqing, he executed a group of progressive young officers who had approached the Americans with a plan to kidnap him in a bid to get him to drop his more reactionary and corrupt associates. Churchill regarded China and its army as a joke, referring to them as ‘400 million pigtails’. Roosevelt simply ...”

“... disproportionately large share of resources. Important evidence of this sort of effect comes from David Haig’s work on the struggle between mother and foetus during pregnancy. Haig argues that foetal genes are selected to take more than maternal genes are selected to give. The result – borne out in many empirical studies – is a series of otherwise ...”

“... many modern historians recognise. In The Long Shadow, his recent study of the legacy of 1914-18, David Reynolds makes the important point that the bulk of contemporary poetry, far from being anti-war, was fiercely patriotic and positive in tone. It is often forgotten that Wilfred Owen went to his grave in 1918 still resolute that the allied cause was ...”

“... led his platoon over the top on the first morning of the Battle of the Somme, holding a gun to one young man’s head to get him to stop crying and keep going. Almost immediately afterwards, Tawney himself was shot through the chest and abdomen and lay for 24 hours in no-man’s-land before being rescued. Although he lived with pain for the rest of his ...”

“... of One’s Own, ‘formidable yet humble with her great forehead and her shabby dress’. As a young woman she gave throbbing lectures in spangled satin and Egyptian beads, and was painted by Augustus John in silks that don’t look too dusty. David Piper called it ‘the only existing humane portrait of a Lady ...”

“... associate with Sydney Kentridge and they are likely to say the Steve Biko inquest. Biko was the young leader of the Black Consciousness movement who in 1977 was tortured and beaten to death over a period of days by members of the South African security police who then, with the connivance of police doctors, lied their way through the inquest conducted by ...”

“... at, as in the school match where Ranji is sneakily (but legally) caught out of his crease by the young M.K. Gandhi (‘the very one who is presently causing us so much trouble!’). And some nagging doubts about Ranji find lodging here: about his fondness for practical jokes, which Auden on Iago is adduced to help us see as ‘slightly sinister’; about his ...”

“... an uncle who had had a bad time in the trenches settled for a career as a big-time embezzler. Young Eric quickly developed his own powers as a con-man, though he had no need to use them to seriously illegal ends. R.M. Ballantyne was his first literary love; a later one was Newth’s Inorganic Chemistry. He made a very ambitious wireless, and carried off a ...”

“... good. Wolff reflects on the spiritual link (as the late 18th century probably saw it) between a young genius and a revered master, and sets the tone of Lang’s Festschrift with some cogent remarks on the diplomat and music patron Baron Gottfried van Swieten, the guardian angel of Mozart’s late style. Richard Taruskin accuses Stravinsky of lying about the ...”

“... the ‘principles and practice’ of the leading painter of the French Revolution, Jacques-Louis David, as he was of Repton and Brown. In discussions of painting Knight professed himself a colourist. He disliked the contemporary fashions for heroic subjects, statuesque figures, the rigidities of planar composition and line, while he praised painters like ...”

“... with his thin paw & swiftly absorbing 3 or 4 large lumps of cake in succession. At home he looks young and rompish at the meeting, at Hunts meeting he looked old and ungainly, but his power & eloquence as a speaker were homeric. But I said at the time that but for his speaking he was in appearance like a cross between a fiend and a tallow ...”

“... culture always recognised, it was the right of the strong over the weak. In recent years radical young Maoris and Pakeha liberals have tended to join in an alliance the justice of whose case is seldom challenged, perhaps because in practical terms it constitutes no threat. Ihimaera’s novel can be read in large part as a restatement of that case, which goes ...”