“... and Edwardian ‘antis’ were far from being advocates of what Marx’s indolent son-in-law Paul Lafargue called ‘the right to be lazy’. Anyone hoping to uncover a hidden history of female hedonism will have to look elsewhere. The antis thought women should work from dawn till dusk for the public weal – but without the tools men had to ...”

“... at the moment he became a monument: there are those he counted as friends (Gertrude Stein, Jean-Paul Sartre) and those he had little time for (André Gide, Jean Cocteau); there’s his wrangling with dealers and gallerists; there’s his involvement with the Communist Party, which he joined in 1944, because one ‘goes to the fountain’; there’s his wit ...”

“... a teddy bear, that bridge inner and outer worlds, are held onto with corresponding intensity, and lay the basis for the infant’s encounters with culture. No one minds lending a friend an egg-whisk, but that’s my book, many people insidiously feel, when someone borrows a well-thumbed text (a text in which the reader has palpably invested their ...”

“... been reissued recently by Penguin, in hardback and with new introductions. It follows the hapless Paul Pennyfeather, who, expelled from Oxford for a misdemeanour he did not commit, wanders through an unsuccessful career as a schoolmaster before becoming engaged to the grand and wealthy Margot Beste-Chetwynde. As it happens, her riches derive principally from ...”

“... in the late 1960s, the Mexico City Metro remained futuristic enough to serve as the backdrop for Paul Verhoeven’s 1990 version of Total Recall. Villoro says there is still fake blood splattered on the ceiling of Chabacano station. ‘City characters’ is one of the six themes Villoro uses to guide us through the megalopolis. Other strands address ...”

“... or twee. The drawings are very much School of Stevie Smith, but even worse than hers, and the lay-out of the book brings to mind those reactionary underground magazines of the Sixties, where clutter and muddle were the major aesthetic aims. The title, Report to the Working Party. Asylum. Otiose [preceded by] After, is the most verbose part of Anthony ...”

“... to acknowledge that for virtually everyone actually involved in the events, the central interest lay elsewhere: in the fear of demonic possession. This fear is present from the very beginning, and it haunts all of Benedetta’s mystical experiences. No matter how alluring or convincing or ecstatic Benedetta’s mystical experiences appeared, it was always a ...”

“... the expeditionary instinct that had Bryn and me angling our shoulders into the existential wind or Paul and me reconstituting ourselves around the thin spills of Old Holborn we smoked in liquorice papers, the sweetness offsetting the dark tobacco and the two together anchoring us after the night of non-being. They were dharma bums, mingling party life with a ...”

“... Chair; for when that informs me my Pound of Food is exhausted I conclude my self to be hungry, and lay in another with all Diligence. In my Days of Abstinence I lose a Pound and an half, and on solemn Fasts am two Pounds lighter than on other Days in the Year.’ Weighing yourself to assuage your fears was one thing; gambling on your weight or someone else’s ...”

“... doctrine could also be the product of a history that he did not control.’ She raises but cannot lay to rest illicit considerations – the suspicion that Freud was a purveyor of cures, rather than cure – because they open onto truths vital to psychoanalysis, rather than the truth about psychoanalysis. Hence the space given over to the assorted and ...”

“... elsewhere that in engineering terms it was not unfeasible, Pick seeks to uncover the history that lay behind this expedition. Malaria first and foremost. Surrounded by the swampy Campagna, crossed by a river which could slow to a near stagnant trickle or flood across the city devastating its antique sewage system, Rome bred mosquitoes of a variety that was ...”

“... the Jacobean Church as it would have seemed to contemporaries, who did not know that civil war lay round the corner. Collinson has done for early 17th-century religion what Conrad Russell has done for early 17th-century politics. He leaves the Church in the late 1620s where Russell has left Parliament – a very long way from revolution. The Jacobean ...”

“... by the touch of a female. After a brisk march through the history of sainthood – from Peter and Paul to the Reformation in just ninety pages – Bartlett turns to a leisured exploration of liturgical commemoration, relics and shrines, pilgrimage, church dedications, personal and place names, images of the saints and literary genres, including hagiography ...”

“... a Common Future: Connecting, Innovating, Transforming’. It is to be held in Kigali, hosted by Paul Kagame, Rwanda’s president for the last two decades: proof enough of his continued good standing in the West. In Britain and beyond, he is credited with ending the genocide of 1994 – ‘one of the fastest killing sprees in human history’, as Michela ...”

“... nationalism. A welcome new biography of Francis Joseph by the French historian, Professor Jean-Paul Bled, comes as a useful and erudite reminder of all that, for the outcome of the annexation now has its painful parallel in the outcome of Europe’s hasty recognitions of breakaway fragments of what is no longer Yugoslavia. The Herzegovina-and-Bosnia ...”