“... This cell had been a coffin to its inhabitants – once inside, they were never to come out. They may have been buried beneath my feet, in this tiny anchorhold in the church of St Nicholas in the village of Compton in Surrey. An anchorite or anchoress permanently encloses themselves in a cell to live a life of prayer and contemplation. The word comes from the ...”

“... meantime, Chernobyl’s number four reactor went into meltdown. I remember, in late April or early May 1986, looking out of our back door at the rain falling on the garden and wondering if it had blown in from the east, laced with strontium-90, and if it was safe to go out in it. At school we read Norman Nicholson’s poem about the Windscale fire of ...”

“... despite his mother’s clamorous love for him, sounds like he was an orphan in his own family – may be a reason for having these kinds of thought, but that only makes them more pertinent. How, White asks, could one be proud of one’s disloyalty? And the answer might be, one could be proud of it if it was part of one’s project to find the impersonal ...”

“... noticeable that Toynbee has more to say about her male than her female ancestors, an emphasis that may simply reflect the realities of educational advantage and career opportunities over the past century and a half. Her mother, Anne Powell, came from a decidedly unintellectual background: Anne’s father, George Powell, was a lieutenant colonel in the ...”

“... is big, impersonal, corporate and international. In a speech introducing Anti-Mafia legislation in May 1980, Pio La Torre observed: Mafia is a terrifying cancer ... that is, a network of relations. We have to find out where certain lines lead and what is behind them. Instead there is total darkness. Maybe we are afraid to reach out to touch something which ...”

“... and ice’. The Establishment, he says, was ‘determined that, come what may, the Duke of Windsor should never return to live in England, or ever recover any work, influence or honour’. Bloch selects the evidence to support his view. The Windsors’ wedding, he notes, was ‘boycotted’ by the Palace: the only present from the King ...”

“... address is provided with a telephonic meaning in the form of a number. Fortunately, dictionaries may be not merely instruments of utility but also objects of delight. One recent addition to the ranks which can claim to offer more entertainment value than most is L.G. Pine’s Dictionary of Mottoes. Which householder among us has not had a gas cooker ...”

“... that a combination of factors, including genetic predisposition, is involved, and that onset may be triggered by a virus. Like lupus and myasthenia gravis, two potentially fatal conditions, MS affects more women than men – the MS Society puts the ratio at 3-2. Susceptibility is thought to be partly related to climate: its incidence is much higher in ...”

“... of her achievement: ‘few writers of our time have been so organised for liberal, for – one may almost put it – heroic production.’ Even as James speculated on how ‘her remarkable life, and still more ... remarkable character’ might ‘lend itself to vivid portraiture’, he recognised how the very magnitude of her production would militate ...”

“... by the time of the Boer War, after another century of imperialism and racialist indoctrination. It may be added that white men everywhere were remarkably free from any dislike of black concubines, but many of them lived under the shadow of fear of black retaliation in kind. It was an added trauma of the plantation world that, as Blackburn observes, there was ...”

“... family, Denis Mack Smith has turned back to a figure who fully engages his sympathies, and some may miss the darkly satirical tone of those earlier essays in denunciation. Mazzini is a work of passionate advocacy, which aims both to remind us of its subject’s enormous importance on the European as well as the Italian stage, and to convince us that on the ...”

“... Lipovetsky’s book is the complete absence of illustrations, even diagrams and graphs. This may be the first book about fashion without pictures – even Roland Barthes used diagrams. Of course, Balzac’s ‘Physiologie de la toilette’ didn’t have any, but that originally appeared in a magazine, and journal publication can preclude pictures even ...”

“... A job application posted through the unusual medium of a scholarly journal? I doubt it, but it may be that this essay found its way onto a desk at Penguin Books, leading to Cannadine’s appointment, in 1988, as general editor of the new Penguin History of Britain. Eight years on – two years longer than it took to commission and publish the entire series ...”

“... The Mandy Rice-Davies response is unlikely to be sufficient in such a setting, and we may find ourselves close to where we started, with adversarial blood-lettings between hired experts – unless the goal of judge-managed litigation really is made the predominant one. The trouble is that judges are not trained to be managers. They are not even ...”

“... individual and communal well-being. The evidentiary base began to expand enormously. Darwin may be seen as the beginning of a tradition – progressive and uncensorious – that construes sex as a natural phenomenon. Sir Patrick Geddes and J.A. Thomason’s popular volume, The Evolution of Sex, and Havelock Ellis’s massive Studies in the Psychology of ...”