“... perfumes. The cloacal mud of low tide mingled deliriously with sulphurous residues trapped in savage greenery: the bindweed, thorns and dark berries of the riverside path. The peninsula thrives on secrecy. For as long as anyone can remember much of this land has been hidden behind tall fences. Walkers held their breath and made a wide circuit. Terrible ...”

“... he had used for his early work. Culliford was the second name of Charles’s maternal uncle, Thomas Barrow, a cultured man who had forbidden Dickens’s father ever again to enter his house after the latter’s failure to honour a debt led to his paying £200 as a guarantor. Dickens identified with this more respectable side of the family and often ...”

“... in Cambridge, dictated his will. He was to be buried alongside a former master of the college, Thomas Legge, who had died twenty years earlier. Gostlin had commissioned a memorial to his friend which you can see on the south wall of the college chapel. Legge kneels in prayer. Beneath him hands clutch at a blazing heart. ‘Love joined them while they ...”

“... emphatically with his fallibilistic science. Roudinesco’s Freud is in this sense a reissue of Thomas Mann’s Freud, who belonged with those 19th-century writers ‘who stand opposed to rationalism’. It is a redemptively anti-heroic project, which allows her to explore without apology the foreign bodies in Freud’s rationality and the errors of his ...”

“... can get together to make up the idiosyncratic English novel. If it lacks the economy of the more savage Ending up (another dark comedy of age), and even something of the hard-hitting sociology of Stanley and the Women, and of the (lesser) Jake’s Thing, The Old Devils has a real largeness of its own that is more than a matter of its sprawling form. And this ...”

“... dinner provided an opportunity for new guests, along with Susan and David [Rieff, her son], to savage those who had sat at the same table the night before.’ It was jerk this, stupid that. The Algonquin Round Table, minus the aperçus. When not writing, reading and performing character assassination at the dining table, Sontag was out on the ...”

“... than in his loves. In 1967, in the United States, he met the translator and writer Norman Thomas di Giovanni, then in his mid-thirties. Over the next few years, as he moved to Buenos Aires, di Giovanni co-ordinated the translation of Borges’s poetry into English, using some of the best contemporary poets and translators such as Alastair ...”

“... and outspoken constitutional democrats, dungeons, torture, disappearance and death. Hassan’s savage treatment of his enemies – not only Moroccans but Sahrawis, the inhabitants of neighbouring Western Sahara, on which he had expansionist designs – continued for most of his reign.All the same, it would be wrong to see the Hassan era as a headlong ...”

“... poetry. Silence invites speculation: critics initially sought to demonise the author of such a ‘savage’ novel, and later to rehabilitate and promote her, often at the expense of her insensitive and rapacious sister Charlotte. In Outsiders, Gordon avoids this, instead reading Emily against her own writings and against other enigmatic characters: Rhoda in ...”

“... is behind that, and it is behind the destruction of the countryside too. For all the savage reductions of recent times, farming still employs too many and produces too much: even before the end of February, when diseased livestock burned on funeral pyres 130 feet high, some farmers were killing their own livestock for want of a profit, or to save ...”

“... position, as did the then deputy, Ian Katz, and others – but he talked about its journalists in savage terms. The Guardian felt strongly that the secret material ought to be redacted to protect informants or bystanders named in it, and Julian was inconsistent about that. I never believed he wanted to endanger such people, but he chose to interpret the ...”

“... or, more accurately, that was when the fire burned itself out. It was perhaps the longest and most savage 24 hours in London since 10 May 1941, when 505 German bombers flew under a full moon and bombed the city relentlessly through the night. The destruction, William Sansom said of the air raid that killed 1436 Londoners, ‘was noticeable in the morning ...”