“... is not beautiful. But that is part of Brown’s point, for he was after qualities that counted for more than beauty. Its subject was carefully chosen. Brown knew that sewers mattered. The threat of cholera haunted Mid-Victorian England, and only efficient sanitation could remove it. Seeing a group of labourers excavating some of the first suburban sewers in ...”

“... insulted. I don’t want to call the book a masterpiece: it isn’t that – but at least it is more a work of art than a disappearing act. The novels by C.K. Stead and Rudolf Nassauer, on the other hand, are distinctly shifty and slippery. The Death of the Body is an elegant contraption whose mainspring is double-time. Although we have been plentifully ...”

“... whether Jews could licitly demand interest from non-Jews remained a point of theological debate. Thomas Aquinas, one of the most influential medieval opponents of usury, described it as an unlawful attempt to charge someone for the use of time itself. For later defenders of interest this was what made it so useful: it was an enticement to get someone to part ...”

“... Rodney Hall tells of a convict at large in New South Wales in 1838, caught up in larger, even more powerful cycles of captivity and exploitation, until he finds temporary sanctuary with an Aboriginal tribe and becomes ‘the very centre of their circle’. Both novels end with violence: but only Carey’s has the nervous optimism to suggest that this ...”

“... friend Hemingway, who tried to bluff his way into a venerable old age. Dos Passos became more invisible and more cranky with each book he published after the USA trilogy. Of the stars of the class of 1918, only William Faulkner survived gracefully, protected by a thick cloak of obscurity until the very end. The ...”

“... and gas reserves than Saudi Arabia and will continue to profit from rising oil prices for several more years. But as the world shifts to alternative energy sources – Gustafson projects a peak in global demand for fossil fuels around 2030, followed by a swift decline – its hydrocarbon revenues will dwindle. What’s ...”

“... Few aspects​ of academic labour are more despised than marking. This is one of its uses, since academics love to complain. But the university is not the safe space for complaint that it once was. Negativity, even ambivalence, is frowned on. Nothing less than complete enthusiasm will satisfy: you must at all times be thrilled to announce, excited to be part of, delighted to share ...”

“... series called Hungry, set during the Great Famine. There were protests outside its offices and more than 42,000 people signed a petition calling for the show to be dropped. At a heated debate on comedy and censorship at the London Irish Comedy Festival, members of the audience made their views on the matter clear. ‘Humour is an affront to the genocide ...”

“... writing which obviously had a private meaning for him.’I was struck by the naive pictures, but more so by the fact that Beegan had been a patient at Netherne Hospital in Coulsdon, where, in effect, I grew up. This is a slight exaggeration: Netherne was where my mother worked, and my grandparents worked before that, and where I spent a great deal of time ...”

“... power to silence competing perspectives and to impose a legitimacy seemingly grounded on nothing more than its own brute assertion. The effort to explain this striking authority has led to the proliferation within American legal academies of important and influential movements like critical legal studies and critical legal sociology. These movements ...”

“... How is sociological research supposed to decide whether this view ought to be superseded by a more indulgent one? When citing instances of commendable deceit Barnes sometimes confounds deceit with tact. Massage-parlour girls who offer sexual services to their customers but are reticent about this to their boyfriends are described as practising ...”

“... form a clear picture of Hindu cave temples or ancient Egyptian palaces, and to contrast them with more familiar Greek, Roman or Gothic buildings, all without getting up from their drawing-boards. Thomson was, by his own admission, captivated by this new literature. Indeed, he seemed to prefer pictures and descriptions of buildings to the real things, since ...”

“... frank versions of a gay overworld (‘Yet when I’ve had you once or twice/I may not want you any more’) would have made him a guru here; I presumed that his recent elegies on the deaths of friends from Aids would have made him a central figure in the literary life of San Francisco. But much of his poetry has also been laden down with paradox and wit; it is ...”

“... Anglo-Saxon and Emrys Jones for Shakespeare. I’m sure he spent many hours in the Bodleian, but more on the rugby pitch. In Singing School he doesn’t mention his literary prizes, but he gives the scores of the rugby matches in which he played and quotes favourable reviews of his performances from newspapers of the day. Stallworthy has always been ...”

“... Leonie Kramer.’ A footnote tells us Professor Kramer is an ‘Australian academic’ – no more. Why she has been singled out for this swipe is unexplained. The reason, I suppose, is that Professor Kramer wrote an unsympathetic piece about Riders in the Chariot in Quadrant in 1973. It was a very schematised and somewhat tedious exercise – but so is ...”