“... questioning. This nation’s history is made up of a succession of struggles for rights, from the Stuart despotism, through the suffragette movement, the General Strike and the hunger marches to the more recent miscarriage of justice scandals, and the judges have throughout been on the side of authority and conservative reaction. There have been and continue ...”

“... architectural history of various subway systems and the theory of names as it developed from John Stuart Mill to Saul Kripke, with, by way of comparison, a solid account of necronym taboos among various tribes. Films, photographs and museum exhibits are everywhere used in evidence, as is an enormous range of recondite archival material. As the founder and ...”

“... lists human fat among the ingredients of his wonder-working oglio del Scoto; in Webster’s White Devil, Isabella dreams of preserving the flesh of her rival, Vittoria, ‘like mummia’, while in The Duchess of Malfi, Bosola imagines the body of the woman he has come to kill as no better than ‘a salvatory’ (or ointment box) filled with ‘green ...”

“... What is this? ‘Two miles behind it a jet of white steam was travelling from the left to the right of the picture.’ It is a train, viewed across a valley, in Jude the Obscure (1895), and it is the only sentence offered there about this train. Flaubert is always described as the great cinematic novelist, the great novelist of detail, and indeed Flaubert has his own described train-steam too – similarly seen, in L’Education sentimentale, across fields, but ‘stretched out in a horizontal line, like a gigantic ostrich feather whose tip kept blowing away ...”

“... The new annotators don’t mention this – Gifford gives no source – and quote instead from Stuart Gilbert, who found in a book called Les Tatouages a record of a prostitute in Naples who had a tattoo on her stomach of a naked woman on whose nipple was seen the numbers 16 and 6, ‘which in Neapolitan slang signify anterior and posterior ...”

“... couldn’t possibly have been a lover. His massive pipe was scarcely [sic] out for a start – the White Cottage carpets reeked of pipe tobacco for twenty years ... he hadn’t that ‘mind’s recoil upon itself’ which makes possible passionate uncertainty, the loss of all gravity which goes with falling in love, the giving-of-oneself, the abandon. He was a ...”

“... theological emphasis, there is no mention here of Dostoevsky, Rilke, Kafka, Bataille, Patrick White, Beckett, Nabokov, Bellow, Spark, Marilynne Robinson, Saramago or Coetzee (whose novel Diary of a Bad Year has several paragraphs on the afterlife). Nabokov’s work is shot through with a persistent mysticism; in Pnin, the author imagines the dead watching ...”

“... Lee Iacocca, Donald Burr of People Express, Steven Jobs and Stephen Wozniak of Apple Computers, Stuart Brand of the Whole Earth Catalogue. Record-breaking athletes like Roger Bannister find their way onto the roll of honour, as does the Salieri of Amadeus: a peak performer deflected from his mission by hopeless envy of Mozart’s inimitable achievement ...”

“... responding on such a level to a sage whose writing, filled with a passionate concern for the (white, male) working poor (and contempt, it sometimes seems, for nearly everyone else), set the terms in which Victorian Britain debated its social and moral state. It is even more discomfiting (indifference seeming even now not an option) to find the ...”

“... has been on the rise too, and has often been cultivated online. The murder of Jo Cox in 2016 by a white supremacist was followed a year later by a foiled plot by members of a neo-Nazi youth network to murder a Labour MP. According to Hope not Hate, a growing number of young men are attracted to violence and are becoming ‘increasingly ideologically ...”

“... less certain than they were when the ships were planned). Their paintwork, with the usual CalMac white superstructure above a black hull, dips in a curve towards the stern, aiming to give an impression of speed, power and modernity. A century ago liners sometimes had an unnecessary third or fourth funnel to achieve the same effect.The Comet was built only a ...”

“... from cheerfulness to death, without it seeming so dark or sordid a journey. The hotels were white. ‘They come here to die,’ wrote the man who laid out the gardens by the pier at Bournemouth. ‘Let us make death beautiful.’ The Royal National Sanitarium opened in 1855, followed by specialised ‘homes’ for invalid ladies, or for consumptives who ...”

“... Having contested that Angevin or Plantaganet rule were ever feudal, he goes on to deny that Stuart government was ever absolutist. ‘England alone evolved from a patrimonial to a bourgeois monarchy,’ he writes: ‘there was no genuinely feudal stage any more than there was ever a genuine absolutism.’ This seems categorical enough. Yet elsewhere, in ...”

“... Exhibition, celebration and controversy are always subject to a few years’ delay. As Stuart Morgan – not a critic much involved in the central controversy, more in internal debates on the contemporary side of the fence – wrote in Frieze’s very first issue (1991), ‘Goldsmiths’ is over’; we’re already into a second generation of ...”

“... or ‘Watchmaker God’, or ‘Obit’) and others that have a crazy, careless energy (‘Mary Stuart’), but many display extreme banality and an uncontrolled garrulousness. ‘Mohammed’ begins: ‘Like Henry VIII, Mohammed got religion/in the dangerous years, and smashed the celibates.’ ‘Bosworth Field’ includes the line: ‘Robespierre and ...”