“... meant that fewer names were betrayed – fail to stack up. The simpler reading is true: such broad absence of evidence really is evidence of absence.The explicit argument of Forbidden Desire has two limbs: Mediterranean cultures shared a pattern of pederastic sodomy, and this pattern was absent from Northern European cultures; both pattern and absence ...”

“... beard care and curated playlists. As with the Beatles album sleeves designed by Peter Blake and Richard Hamilton, this was where art and pop first locked eyes, before deciding to move in together.Ahalf-century​ on from the band’s messy divorce, you don’t have to go searching for Beatles bumpf: it’s everywhere. They’re as much a part of the public ...”

“... Britain’s Tristan, and, very possibly, the lais of Marie de France. More was written under the broad aegis of the Angevin courts, of Henry II and the various powerful women connected with him (his wife Eleanor of Aquitaine, her daughter Marie de Champagne), and circulated freely on both sides of the Channel. Where we have a name for a writer, such as ...”

“... working with Hamas, shuttling between Palestinians on the ground and President Arafat to ensure broad participation and continued momentum – were passé. We were in a new era, and it required new thinking: ‘The road to Jerusalem now passes through Baghdad,’ the official insisted. He was speaking just before the 2003 invasion. The message was ...”

“... night after night, and doing all those unspeakable things to her, was me.’ Marguerite’s boss, Richard Knox, has also been sleeping with Isobel, while the footnotes in After Absalon conclude with the revelation that Harold, discovered rootling through a wheelie bin, is alive and well. While the footnotes supply one ending, the main narrative leaves us with ...”

“... family reader. As will be evident, BLM’s definition of what constitutes a literary magazine is broad, verging on indiscriminate. Woman’s World and Vanity Fair gain entry, as does Rhythm (although the editors have generally steered prudently clear of little magazines). Journals like the Contemporary Review which snootily considered themselves above ...”

“... white, the way coal turns to ash: when he was a little boy Willie half-believed this and he wore a broad-brimmed hat and long-sleeved shirt in the summer, for if he turned white ‘none of the really fine sisters would let him kiss them.’ Each chapter represents a day in the boys’ Christmas week and each of them, with a little trimming, could be printed ...”

“... to the left of the headword. Murray’s successors William Craigie and Charles Onions tussled over whether to maintain this practice. Proofs of the Supplement dated 11 September 1929 retain Murray’s so-called tramlines; in the next proofs, dated 2 July 1930, they are gone. Between these dates, Onions joined the BBC Advisory Committee on Spoken English, where he became acutely aware of the prejudices that led some people to stigmatise new or imported terms; tramlines, he felt, didn’t help ...”

“... starting The Corrections (2001) with a view to providing more traditional pleasures as well as a broad social panorama. (He has also adopted a qualified god-that-failed position towards old-school avant-gardism.) And Dave Eggers, in both his writing and his activities as an editor-impresario, has promoted a puppy-eyed, heart-on-sleeve tricksiness, a ...”

“... of these women had been, before she achieved her second distinction, the wife of a wealthy and broad-minded patron, for whose marriage Cummings had written his longest poem by way of epithalamion. This thread is never quite out of the narrative because by her Cummings had a daughter before he was in a position to recognise the relationship. When it was ...”

“... a weak attempt to peg a man he had met in Nevada State Prison: ‘I said he “had a smile as broad as a Jack O’ Lantern and a heart as big as his head.” I don’t know what he was really like.’ He has a similar problem in On the Yard. His efforts to vary the texture of the novel by laying on lurid detail seem shameless; when he tries to get up the ...”

“... turned, from which some semblance of pre-modern Gemeinschaft might still just about be salvaged. Richard Steele, Oliver Goldsmith, Laurence Sterne, Francis Hutcheson and Edmund Burke all made vital Irish contributions to this nouvelle vague of meekness, tendresse, womanliness, the glowing, melting sentiments, while David Hume, Adam Smith, Henry Mackenzie and ...”

“... it to the BBC complaints department, and had not mentioned it at lunch with Gilligan’s boss, Richard Sambrook. But he then made ‘three key moves’: on 25 June he denounced Gilligan’s story to the Select Committee on Foreign Affairs (‘Until the BBC acknowledges that is a lie, I will keep banging on’); on 26 June he wrote to Sambrook demanding a ...”

“... R. Ford, President of the United States . . . do grant a full, free, and absolute pardon unto Richard Nixon for all offences against the United States which he, Richard Nixon, has committed or may have committed or taken part in during the period from January 20, 1969 through August 9, 1974. Nixon himself had ...”

“... were burrowing into their childhoods, ‘before the first war’. The 20th century lay stacked in broad layers of time: dark moorland where glistened an occasional white milestone marked with a year and an event. Sometimes the events were large and public. The General Strike happened in 1926 and Germany invaded Poland in 1939. But often they were small and ...”