“... in front of the window. There were six or seven of them. The wolves were quite white, and looked more like foxes or sheep-dogs, for they had big tails like foxes and they had their ears pricked like dogs when they pay attention to something. In great terror, evidently of being eaten up by the wolves, I screamed and woke up. This is the Wolf-Man’s ...”

“... challenges in mind. Apart from its title sequence, his second book, Airy Hall (1989), was a much more troublesome affair, showing the pressure of a more discursive and politically complex area of his imagination, at some cost to clarity and impetus. ‘The Kitchen Bitch’, an ambitious but clotted narrative, seemed ...”

“... Swann is obsessed by what he doesn’t know about Odette. His anguish has no remedy; finding out more only adds to what he does know about her. Since Kant, lots of philosophers have suffered from a generalised and aggravated form of the same complaint. They want to know what the world is like when they aren’t thinking about it; what things are like, not ...”

“... Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and whatever else flew into your consciousness) you got something more like a second-hand bookshop – a place where you could rummage pleasurably for hours and come away with a quite different idea from what you thought you might have been looking for. There are no amateur readers like myself represented in Goffman’s ...”

“... with its numinous landscapes that ‘never existed on earth’. The imagined Palestine mattered more than the actual place. ‘I don’t want to know where it is,’ Lawrence remarked. ‘I never want to go to Palestine.’ For many, this habit of thought was constantly reinforced by the extraordinary persistence of The Pilgrim’s Progress as a template ...”

“... and Russians in unconvincing native disguises sometimes ventured into the contentious territories, more usually both sides made use of proxies. Hence the phrase ‘tournament of shadows’, a coinage of the Russian Foreign Minister, Count Nesselrode. The British used Indian pandits who had been carefully trained in the skills of surveying and espionage. The ...”

“... for her body ‘as it was the last time she really liked it’. And lo, she finds herself once more housed in the ‘serviceable and agreeable’ form she possessed some fifteen years earlier, bearing some marks of experience (an appendix scar), but otherwise compact, neat, strong. She feels wonderful. ‘I can go in the streets, she said to herself, and ...”

“... the name of God was blasphemy and the penalty was stoning to death. The prohibition is stated in more general and familiar terms in the third commandment (Exodus 20.7). The idea got more complicated when applied to the more complicated God of Christianity; for instance, it was blasphemy ...”

“... are entirely confident that whatever limited niche they allot the judiciary, the judges will be more than happy to squeeze dutifully into it. They should be made to think again. I like to think that if he were suddenly transposed to the present, Lord Russell of Killowen, with his experience of the Parnell Commission and his 19th-century Irish ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... snaps her fingers at the law and all its pains and punishments and cries out for new victims and more gold. Can that woman sleep?’Restell monetised the desperation of other women into a supremely lucrative business. In 1860, the Chicago Tribune reported that ‘she has three grandchildren who will inherit about $400,000 when Madame Restell turns up her ...”

“... 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 ...”