“... Rubenhold forces us to watch this new romance develop, post-abortion, in the summer of 1892. We know, of course, that this same woman will, eighteen years later, lie filleted and boneless, her head and organs removed, under the cellar floor of 39 Hilldrop Crescent, just off Camden Road in North London.Rubenhold’s explanation for Cora’s falling in ...”

“... Canada.Seward also negotiated a treaty with Denmark to acquire the islands of St Thomas and St John, two of its possessions in the Caribbean. A State Department report of 1868, produced for Seward by the former Mississippi senator and ardent expansionist Robert J. Walker, suggested ‘the propriety of obtaining from the same power Greenland, and probably ...”

“... the actual average figure in the UK is 164 feet.) One possible source is The Rat Problem (1909) by W.R. Boelter, a book that is part natural history, part anti-rat screed. Boelter estimated that there were forty million rats living in the UK – one for every acre of arable land, and roughly equal to the human population at the time. His great enemy was Rattus ...”

“... much Norman Lamont’s career in a nutshell). Later in the century, Richard FitzNeal, first as dean of Lincoln and latterly as bishop of London, continued in his day job in the church while moonlighting as treasurer ” for an apparently unbroken forty years. It’s as though Jim Callaghan were now preparing to leave 11 Downing Street after serving ...”

“... arguable that both the skill and the ideology of the modern Western soldier have been, shall we say, sharpened by years of frenetic and dedicated service in the box bedroom. Halo is basically the story of a super-soldier who is fighting a theocratic nightmare called the Covenant, with the person at the video console, if he is skilful enough, framed as ...”

“... moment, and then lowered her gun. She said: ‘My name is Lee Meng. Go and tell your comrades that we do not murder helpless men.’ Then she and her companions vanished back into the trees. Lee Meng A year later, when I was in my first term at Cambridge, I heard that Lee Meng had been caught and condemned to hang. All appeals had failed. Dingle Foot was ...”

“... Elena Kagan, Barack Obama’s nominee to replace the retiring Supreme Court justice John Paul Stevens, is scheduled to appear before the Senate Judiciary Committee in late June. Before she is confirmed by the committee, she will have to answer questions about her views on the constitution and her lack of judicial experience ...”

“... someone really insane to fix the economy’; but by the time he wrote about politics, profiling John McCain for Rolling Stone in 2000, he was basically a liberal Democrat.) His roommate Mark Costello became a lifelong confidant and sometime collaborator. (Costello is now a novelist in New York and teaches law at Fordham University.) Wallace’s depression ...”

“... with ‘The Battle Hymn of the Republic’. ‘Daily, at this time,’ the station announced, ‘we shall speak to you about America and the war … The news may be good or bad – we shall tell you the truth.’ Since then, VOA has produced content in 83 languages and is one of the few independent sources of information ...”

“... And, amazingly, there it was: his name, our old address, the unchanged telephone number, as if we had never gone away to the unmentionable country across the border. It was an eerie discovery. I felt as if I were being claimed, or informed that the facts of my faraway life were illusions: that this – this continuity – was the reality. Then I went to ...”

“... authorship, death and readership – wrapped up in one neat package so intricately knotted that we can pick it up, feel its weight and then chuck it in the back of the drawer where it belongs. We might judge the final episode of Cold Lazarus an appropriate moment to draw a line under self-referential fiction, raise our ...”

“... who teaches at Duke University, which publishes Social Text, and a man widely regarded as the very dean of advanced (literary) ‘theory’, replied on the oped page of the New York Times. There, he used the phrase, or its cognates, 16 times in a few paragraphs. If a cancer cell did that to a human body, death would be immediate. Sokal has since been an ...”

“... We have good reason to be wary of paternal metaphors for authorship, but characterising W.D. Howells as the father of The Whole Family is hard to resist – if only because it reminds us of how little control a modern patriarch has over his offspring. A composite novel by 12 hands that originated in a suggestion from Howells to the editor of Harper’s Bazar (as the magazine was then called) in the spring of 1906, The Whole Family began its serial run the following year with a contribution by Howells himself ...”

“... ignorant, the most bigoted, the most superstitious of all the Roman Catholics in Christendom,’ John Adams, the second American president, wrote in 1815. The notion that they could form a ‘confederation of free governments’, as the Venezuelan revolutionary Francisco de Miranda had proposed, was as ‘absurd as similar plans would be to establish ...”

“... they call it heavenly love;And the other a spook or a birdOr possibly merely a Word.Rejoice! We are ruled thru’ infinityBy this highly dysfunctional Trinity!10 January. In George Lyttelton’s Commonplace Book it’s recorded that Yeats told Peter Warlock that after being invited to hear ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’ (a solitary man’s expression ...”