“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”