“... friend: ‘The spirits of my African ancestors were there. I could feel them and they really took hold of me . . . I could see them moving about . . . Yes, it was deep, man . . . I just let the spirits take hold of me . . . But you know, I expect people to respect me. What I do demands so much of me that they must respect what I do.’ It turns ...”

“... via the Egyptian capital of Alexandria and Syrian Antioch. Back in her home town she took up with another rising political star, Justinian, the nephew and adopted son of the then emperor, Justin. This time the pair did marry, but only after Justin’s disapproving wife had died and the elderly emperor was persuaded to change the law to allow ...”

“... I avoid all worldly fun. Many photographs of the visionary follow, taken by her Polish father. John K. Sagatis, who died, the book alleges, as a result of the wanton neglect of an NHS hospital. These photographs of an aspiring saint are fascinating: reproduced in the degraded colour of multiple xeroxing, they turn Sister Marie into a kind of performance ...”

“... for Jones seems the weakest: it is advanced by Jones’s admirers, not by the poet himself, who took no interest in the question, having other fish to fry; and unlike most modernists, Jones had no patience with prosody. The claim for Bunting is not contested, and seems incontestable. As for MacDiarmid, he certainly made the claim for himself, loudly. But as ...”

“... recorded incidents of terrorism increased fourfold: out of 6,714 such incidents no less than 5,034 took place in Western Europe, Latin America and the Middle East (in that order). Only 62 occurred in the USSR and Eastern Europe; most of these involved attempts to escape – for example, by hijacking aircraft. These attempts are not regarded in the USSR as ...”

“... Middle-march. It is no use Gordon Haight’s denying that George Eliot meant to satirise Pattison: John Sparrow has pointed out that in that case it is odd that George Eliot, who was well acquainted with Pattison and his much younger wife, should have chosen to call the author of the Key to All Mythologies by the name of a 16th-century French scholar whose ...”

“... writing as an adult male about his Michigan girlhood and the path a mutated gene took through three generations before reaching him. These two books suggest an inventive writer committed to finding a new structure and voice for each story he tells. That such a writer would then publish a semi-autobiographical coming of age story, following ...”

“... a go at closing down the combination room in which the plots against him were hatched. The fellows took their master first to the college visitor (the Bishop of Ely, who was supposed to arbitrate in these kinds of dispute) and then repeatedly to court. His more colourful biographers dwell on other scandals too: when a gun was discharged into the study of the ...”

“... too passive and nationalistic. His frenetic, channel-surfing 28-minute collage of digital imagery took in Japanese Pepsi commercials and experimental theatre. The New York Times obituary of Paik, who died in January 2006, described him as a ‘prophet’ of video art; his predictions of a mass media age seem extraordinary today. In a 1974 essay based on his ...”

“... Desmond in Sunset Boulevard (1950) is the most recognisable, though I prefer Myrtle Gordon in John Cassavetes’s Opening Night (1977). Myrtle, played by Gena Rowlands, is in the twilight of her career and bent on sabotaging the play for which she’s currently rehearsing. She drinks too much; is haunted by a woman with a striking resemblance to her ...”

“... Wortley Montagu’s letters are an early example of a rare source: first-hand information. She took the line – which was to become common among travellers – that harem days were more humdrum, the emotions more ordinary and the life more open and pleasant than Europeans imagined. But the harems of fact (and even Lady Mary’s account was not untouched ...”

“... odd fish?’ Severn also asked, and Crane’s book is an attempt to answer that question. Edward John Trelawny was born in 1792 and died in 1881. In his later years he was a legendary figure, farouche and craggy, a solitary survivor from an epoch which already seemed fabulously remote: here, living on deep into the later Victorian age was a man who had once ...”

“... Big Jim’s books. A warrant for the dishonoured sheriff’s arrest was issued and, after Big Jim took off, his devoted deputies refused to serve it. In many ways, Jim Thompson grew up in his father’s shadow, never managing to be quite so popular (or quite so loathed) as Big Jim himself – but this doesn’t mean Little Jim didn’t give it the old college ...”

“... the Old and New Testaments. Here, as in most fields of Orientalism, it was the Germans who took the lead. Gustav Weil and Theodor Nöldeke attempted to fix the chronological order of the revelation and determine which verses were revealed to Muhammad in Mecca and which came later, after he had been driven into exile in Medina. Orientalists ...”

“... resemblance to Monica Lewinsky). They shot his three bodyguards dead, set fire to his home and took him to a safe house from which he was allowed to phone a TV station in order to call on Maliki not to attack the Mehdi Army. Why did the Iraqi army fail? Training a new army has been at the centre of British and American policy for the last four years. At ...”