“... from a dwarfish man, and confronts her at home. She triumphantly reveals a tattoo of dagger and rose: ‘I felt dishonoured every time you touched me. I shall never let you touch me again.’ That’s about as good as heterosexual relations get in this book. In ‘The Crew from M6’ they are given even shorter shrift. A TV crew films a lesbian household in ...”

“... later, its myth of ‘the road’. Reading accounts of fast-food operations and franchises that rose meteorically and crashed even faster, we see the indomitable and often amoral drive to ingest and expand which still characterises American entrepreneurial culture. Ray Kroc, the hamburger guru of McDonald’s and pre-eminent fast-food entrepreneur, emerges ...”

“... the ruins of the twin buildings of the General Staff headquarters, built in the 1970s and clad in rose marble to evoke the canyon of the Sutjeska River in Bosnia-Herzegovina (the site of one of the more famous of Tito’s offensives). The Neoclassical Foreign Ministry across the road is hidden by scaffolding. On the pedestrianised Knez Mihajlova Street, the ...”

“... loss to anthropology proper, however much of a loss it might be to humanity in general. Turnbull rose to popular fame (and fortune) with his work on the gentle Mbuti and the abominable Ik, and Peter Brook added to his fame with the theatrical version of the latter (Les Iks, to be exact). Anthropologists were tolerant of The Forest People (1961) despite its ...”

“... the worn-out genius: the Eng. Lit. patient, palely loitering. It’s a conservative premise. The mark of ‘genius’ is surely dissatisfaction, the ability to imagine beyond what has already been done. Motion imagines the least imaginative route Keats, had he lived, could have taken: usefulness. Anthony Burgess suggested a wittier alternative in his ...”

“... Smiles dwelled on the ability of ‘the humblest’ to define themselves and make their own mark on the world. His heroes are tinkers, tailors, soldiers, sailors, weavers, servants and common day-labourers – trades grouped together as the producers of ‘great men of science, literature and art’. Capsule biographies of these great men form the bulk ...”

“... We used to be told that Rome rose to imperial greatness through the native wit and lean frames of its farmer soldiers. And that if it wasn’t lead poisoning, orgies and overindulgence of every kind, it was race-mixing that brought about its fall, the descendants of Oriental slaves having weakened the native stock ...”

“... mass entertainment. His so-called Monster Meetings were carnivals as much as demonstrations, and mark the beginning of mass politics in the modern age. When he wasn’t haranguing thousands of small farmers about Catholic emancipation or the repeal of the Union, O’Connell practised as a barrister, the most theatrical of the professions. Tony Blair was also ...”

“... musical entertainment. Its greatest figure, who has been properly honoured in the 536 pages of Mark Tucker’s Duke Ellington Reader, a ‘source-book of writings on Ellington’, lived and died as a travelling band-leader. It was not that he had to – in his later years he subsidised his band out of his royalties – but that he could not conceive of ...”

“... perhaps, is the omission of any reference to the most important Ralegh discovery in recent years, Mark Nicholls’s publication in 1995 of the prosecution summary of the evidence in the Main Plot trial of 1603. This is not the first edition of Ralegh’s letters. Edward Edwards published 159 letters in his Life of Ralegh in 1868, but chiefly from the main ...”

“... As a vision of heaven from the hollows of         ocean, that none but a god might see, Rose out of the silence of things unknown of                 a presence, a form, a might, And we heard as a prophet that hears God’s             message against him, and may not flee.Swinburne’s grandest theme of all, the ...”

“... late as 1912 the editor of the Ladies’ Home Journal said that ‘men continued to see rouge as a mark of sex and sin.’ That same year, however, twenty thousand women, watched by half a million onlookers, marched in New York City for the right to vote: the leaders, who included some society ladies, wore bright red lipstick. The march was joined by Elizabeth ...”

“... of them as though they were still alive. As late as the autumn of 1992, when Middle England rose in revolt against the annihilation of the industry, the miner’s labour was identified so completely with the cause of manufacturing industry that a newly-elected Conservative government found itself in deep trouble with its own supporters when it tried to ...”

“... Peter Frampton as the headliner. The audience got restless and began heckling around the one-hour mark. Streisand and Kristofferson had a shouting match backstage while miked up; it was all over the news.Luckily for her, the studio didn’t like Pierson’s cut of the movie, so she was allowed to edit it herself. A team of editors worked round the clock while ...”

“... to succeed in prose’. He would succeed in both, and it’s hard to think of another writer who rose to fame as a novelist only to become famous a second time for his poetry. Couching it in these terms, though, downplays Hardy’s gravitation towards original weakness, unfresh starts, failure. Thinking about poetry on New Year’s Day 1879, he made a note ...”