“... years ago in Capitalism and Slavery, Liverpool went from having a single slave ship in 1709 to more than a hundred six decades later. By 1795 it controlled almost half of the European slave trade. Ships left the port carrying guns, brandy and textiles that were exchanged on the Guinea coast for gold, ivory, pepper and people. About 1.5 million Africans ...”

“... Wound and the Bow. But if so, Lawrence wanted to be in a different business. Modernist sickness is more likely to be neurasthenia or hypochondria than the real thing, and to Lawrence, such sickness represents the fatal flaw of the modern novel. He described Mann as ‘the last sick sufferer from the complaint of Flaubert. The latter stood away from life as ...”

“... with basalt or patinated bronze, which were as much valued by connoisseurs as statuary marble. Far more significant than any sense of difference which colour might suggest was the ‘evidence’ that blacks were not brothers ‘under the skin’. In Julien-Joseph Virey’s popular Histoire Naturelle du Génie Humain (first published in 1801) a profile taken ...”

“... was a married woman not a parthenos – a married parthenos is a contradiction in terms. What’s more, she produced several sons. One of them presided over the Jesus movement for thirty years after his brother’s death. He was a pious Jew. So was Jesus. His teaching, whatever it was, wasn’t meant for you. And what about all those miracles, jumpstarting ...”

“... last. Anywhere but here occupies 406 large pages, and tacitly insists that it is considerably more than a lyric presentation of adolescence. But more deeply than in its use of a resonant, comparison-inviting narrative scheme, or its insistence on history as context for individual lives, or its sense that the story of ...”

“... of higher education under New Labour, supposedly exposed vast swathes of young people to a more cosmopolitan, liberal mindset, indifferent to national tradition or received moral principle. Some go further still, arguing that the universities – and the humanities in particular – have bred a whole generation of graduates preoccupied with the ...”

“... that reflects the outsider’s – or rather the insider’s – view of bohemia. The reality is more complicated and ambiguous. There is glamour, but it is the flip-side of the poverty and failure that are essential to the bohemian ethos, as, too, is tedium, though of a peculiar sort. ‘Day after uneventful day,’ Quentin Crisp remembered, writing about ...”

“... population was 5.3 million. Though a remarkable demographic fact by any standard, it seems even more remarkable given that at the time the combined population of England and Wales was only 9.2 million. It was the famine and emigration of the 19th century – as nationalists were acutely aware – that saw Ireland’s population drop and then stabilise while ...”

“... suggest that as a nation we are remarkably ignorant about the EU and its institutions. If we knew more, would we be more communitaire, or even less? As an anthropologist my own regional specialisation is in Amazonia, but in 1999 I was commissioned to shoot a film for BBC2 about the workings of the European Parliament. It ...”

“... pursuit of moral ideals. Certainly, her life had a richly quirky and wilful side. But was it any more quirky than those of her male contemporaries – Shaw, Stead, Wilde or Yeats? This book goes a long way towards rescuing Besant from a condescending double standard. By any standard, this life was extraordinary: not because of any special originality of ...”

“... banal despairs that one feels Larkin had in mind, and this book is rather a study of the larger, more peculiar family life of Fitzrovian pub culture than an epic of the typically domestic version. Motion’s Tolstoyan incipit, ‘Families are societies in miniature,’ seems the wrong way round: this family was society writ large – its members were ...”

“... throughout his writing life. There isn’t much in the poetry that would provide fuel for the more significant engines of reputation. It is too heterodox in form and method, and too various to characterise or place comfortably in the context of contemporary British poetry, beyond the idiotic and self-marginalising labels of ‘outsider’ or ...”

“... vulgar caricatures of religious faith that would make a first-year theology student wince. The more they detest religion, the more ill-informed their criticisms of it tend to be. If they were asked to pass judgment on phenomenology or the geopolitics of South Asia, they would no doubt bone up on the question as ...”

“... American sociologist, reporting on fieldwork he had undertaken at a psychiatric institution with more than seven thousand inmates. ‘My immediate object . . . was to try to learn about the social world of the hospital inmate, as this world is subjectively experienced by him. I started out in the role of an assistant to the athletic director, when pressed ...”

“... Kleinberg, ‘a sceptic by nature, and when it comes to religious phenomena . . . even more sceptical’, found that he accepted Mother Teresa’s claim unquestioningly. ‘For an instant, at least, I believed that those words were the pure truth,’ and that this absolute love for the leper dying in her arms ‘transformed the scene from a banal ...”