“... like some of the sources used by orthodox contemporary histories of the Transportation System. Robert Hughes’s discussion of the Port Arthur penal colony could almost be a description of Jorgensen’s chronicle – although Hughes’s tone, predictably, is rather less admiring than Gould’s: To scrutinise the punishment records . . . is to look into a ...”

“... the usual upright, and excruciatingly painful, position. One of the most memorable passages in Robert Harris’s new novel, Imperium, describes the famous crucifixion of the six thousand slave comrades of the rebel Spartacus, who had been rounded up by the Romans in 71 BC. Harris imagines the victorious Roman general, Crassus, carefully choreographing this ...”

“... she can now go back, what was home has vanished. Like the hero of another Russian fairy tale, she may well say: ‘I will go I know not where; I will bring back I know not what.’ In an article on Ugrešić and one of her sister witches, Slavenka Drakulic, Sanja Bahun (also Yugoslav-born) discusses the dilemma of Yugo-stalgia for writers in their ...”

“... and post-minimalist sculptors of her own generation or slightly older – figures such as Robert Morris, Sol LeWitt and Richard Serra – and then with the promotion, through the journal October, which she co-founded in 1976, of a somewhat younger group of postmodern artists who substituted photographic imagery for painting, among them James ...”

“... Charles Dickens, Henry James, Bram Stoker, Ulysses S. Grant, Toulouse-Lautrec, Lillie Langtry, Robert Mitchum and Jean Cocteau were also on the books. Some of their accounts are closed, crossed out with lines of red ink and marked ‘Dead’. Grand Duke Sergei of Russia’s reads ‘Assassinated’. A ‘Sundry Debtors’ list from 1909-41 fills a hundred ...”

“... in LA a few months earlier of his most likely challenger, the increasingly left-leaning Robert Kennedy. Then came the Manson killings. The LA Free Press defended Manson after his arrest as a victim of the local establishment, and radical LA seemed either to have succumbed to decadence, or to have run into the sand. Yet like many veteran ...”

“... is not a Bolshevist, an Atheist, or a Communist, is not a Prohibitionist, in spite of what anyone may say, her husband was not a conscientious objector, and her children are not neglected.’ She was disappointed that the first woman to take a seat in the Commons was the Conservative Nancy Astor, whom she did not consider ‘a good specimen for the first ...”

“... washed up at Preston in Sussex, Lady Shirley asked her steward to send them up to London ‘so we may drink it, which will end the dispute with the commissions of the customs’.When goods went missing it was always easy to blame the people who actually heaved them from the sea. Sir John Killigrew, who held the right to wrecks on the Lizard peninsula, faced ...”

“... is private property.’ The property owner doesn’t specify the threat Tunde poses. It may be the act of having set up a tripod, the taking of the photograph or his physical presence, but ‘this isn’t the first time this kind of thing has happened to him.’Tunde, like Cole, grew up in Lagos but has lived in the United States for nearly three ...”

“... by rejecting foreign products. When the Qianlong emperor wrote ‘we possess all things,’ he may have meant that long before Macartney arrived, the Qing emperors, aristocracy and the Chinese elites had already acquired the European goods they wanted: pocket watches, muskets, spectacles, magnifying glasses, telescopes, mechanical models of the solar ...”

“... a Bible in a tube of sunlight’. So, all right, there is no comma here – Morrison’s editor, Robert Gottlieb, said he was always inserting commas into her sentences and she was always taking them out again – but it is not so distinctive as the word ‘tube’. Thirty-four years ago, I stopped reading, right here, to puzzle whether this should be a ...”

“... hazards than Your Majesty.’ ‘Not so,’ said William. ‘I am where it is my duty to be; and I may without presumption commit my life to God’s keeping; but you …’At this instant, a cannonball from the ramparts laid Godfrey dead at the king’s feet. Macaulay goes on to say that ‘it was not found, however, that the fear of being Godfreyed – such ...”

“... in a growing body of writing as a sanctuary. ‘Healthy’ homes made for healthy children, Robert Edis argued in Decoration and Furniture of Town Houses (1881). Thomas Horsfall, a philanthropist and heir to a textiles fortune, agreed. Children form ‘habits of thought and feeling’, he wrote in an essay on ‘The Use of Pictures and Other Works of ...”

“... earliest work did not necessarily have these qualities. His 1882 painting of a flamenco dancer may have reminded admiring critics of Goya, but his 1884 portrait of ‘Madame X’, the American-born adventuress Virginie Gautreau, shocked Paris with its louche portrayal of the wife of a wealthy French banker, her naked shoulders and décolleté rendered ...”

“... imply that a writer’s first novel began to be worked on more or less from the time he was born may seem a very ordinary idea indeed. However that may be, I can’t go back so far, and only feel inclined to because the exercise might illuminate what I have to say later. The cinema was not the only influence in those early ...”