“... crime dramas where the killer question is saved until the witness has begun to relax: ‘One more thing, sir. We keep being told about the London Art Market, but we can’t find it. Could you tell us where it is?’ My friend swallowed hard. It became an anecdote. But the policeman’s question, if naive, wasn’t stupid. What, after all, is a ...”

“... company’: a film-maker and accountant were members, along with Rotten – now using his more sober real name, John Lydon – and three other musicians. In October, PiL released their first product, a single called, with corporate thoroughness, ‘Public Image’. It was a streamlined, surging noise that hadn’t been heard before, and reached number ...”

“... an overwhelming, if not quite universal success. But most critics agreed that her performance was more than worthy of her name; and in her first season alone she managed to earn almost triple what her aunt Siddons had done at the peak of her career. The newspapers, by her own account, included almost daily notices of her activities; ...”

“... Reverdy, who turned this line into a directive that images be born from ‘a juxtaposition of two more or less distant realities’. Abrupt encounters – between texts, pictures, things, places and people – became the staple of Surrealist production, including its greatest novels, Nadja and Le Paysan de Paris.Dada was one essential prompt for ...”

“... The experience brought out something reckless in even the most serious. William Hamilton, who did more than anyone to further vulcanology as an academic study, made the ascent during the 1767 eruption in the company of the art historian Johann Winckelmann. They were travelling with the Prussian ambassador to Vienna, who had written a guidebook to Sicily, and ...”

“... in bottles, in London chemists’ windows. The domestic slaphappiness of the monks in Sinai is more than balanced by that of the filthy students at Maynooth College, in Ireland. It is hard not to marvel at the expense of spirit shown in tracing the source of rivers, or in ensuring that Englishwomen, wherever they are, do not fall below their station; and ...”

“... and influential, possibly because he was the most pessimistic. Havelock Ellis (1859-1939) seems more elusive. Ellis has received critical and biographical attention before, notably in Arthur Calder-Marshall’s well-known study of 1959, and also in Vincent Brome’s Havelock Ellis: Philosopher of Love, published last year. But students of biography will ...”

“... Stocking’s beautifully-edited Journals of Claire Clairmont had just come out, and she knew more about Claire than all the brains of the Byron Society put together. This did not stop those brains from working away at the Central Question – the sexual relations of Shelley and Claire. The Byron-worshippers were torn between those who were quite certain ...”

“... we’ve used for as long as we can remember, such as curing, drying and fermentation, which free more glutamate from its protein bindings. In almost every region of the world some version of one of these methods has been handed down: in Russia it’s salted herring, in Poland smoked sausage. There’s the shrimp paste of the Philippines, the fish sauce of ...”

“... from a Tupperware party whose hostess had put perhaps too much kirsch in the fondue,’ begins Thomas Pynchon’s 1966 novel, The Crying of Lot 49. Mid-1960s readers knew instantly where they were; the telltale combination of Tupperware party and fondue said ‘suburbia’ as loudly as if the word itself had been printed as a date-line on the page. As ...”

“... was heading for a landslide victory in November’s election. The episode seemed to be nothing more than a ‘caper’ undertaken by over-enthusiastic underlings. Only Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of the Washington Post, two inexperienced journalists on the local beat, persisted with the story. For the moment, the burglars kept quiet, and no mud ...”

“... locked the files away from me, so my most recent take on male duplicity came from the novels of Thomas Hardy. The 1960s were behind us, the era of free love, but it had not dawned in Wilmslow, from where we commuted on weekdays on the crowded 7.45. I guessed why Nicolette had moved across the square. It was more discreet ...”

“... from the sand, the way they had watched their mothers glean loose sheaves from the fields. Thomas Peck, a labourer, gathered around twelve pounds of raisins, ‘which he did put into the sleeves of his coat and carry home with him’. The wife of Henry Harvest found only half that number, with ‘a great deal of gravel and sand amongst them’. The ...”

“... friend (addressed in the novel as ‘you’), the memory of whom occasionally overwhelms him. More than the ups and downs of his personal life, however, Tunde is preoccupied with the symptoms of white supremacy and colonialism he perceives around him: in museums and in articles; in AI-generated images (‘in thirty minutes of clicking he has landed on not ...”

“... that he had not really slain the monster but only wounded his pride, thick as his hide. Once more he had to live by his wits. In his new country the Poet heard threats from the Tyrant’s henchmen but never from the Beast himself, a proud monster. His pursuers were worried (agents are a worried lot) about the Poet’s singing. Not that they feared he ...”