“... No Pumps! No Surgery!’). Another site, registered to the same address on Heslington Road by ‘Mark Smith’, apparently an alias for Entwistle, was deephotsex.co.uk, which promised ‘Over 150,000 images of innocent teens’, ‘Real World Hidden Sex Cams’ and ‘Live sex shows where you tell girls what to do’. The nastiness of these efforts ...”

“... calling about a patient, a Mr Midgley.’ Noiselessly Miss Tunstall added an exclamation mark to ‘This hooliganism must now STOP!’ and waited, her hands spread over the keys. ‘What is the patient’s name?’ ‘Midgley,’ said Midgley. ‘He came in this morning.’ ‘When was he admitted?’ ‘This morning.’ ‘Midgley.’ There was a ...”

“... is the nearest that Roussel’s writing ever comes to entering the inner world of another person.) Mark Ford is alive to the idiosyncratic nature of Roussel’s ‘self-evident uniqueness’ and ‘unassailable self-referentiality’, just as he is aware of the dangers of seeking to contextualise or even to ‘understand’ Roussel’s work, rendering it less ...”

“... layout. Its paragraphs are substantial and sometimes enormous, occasionally passing the five-page mark though never the ten. The withholding of a pause on the page, a symbolic breathing space, is an indispensable aspect of some writers’ rhetorical equipment, part of the way they impose their vision. In novels by Bolaño (By Night in Chile) or Bernhard ...”

“... a child at school for the first time, the sheer ineptitude, as though you’ll never learn to mark out your own space. It’s doubly shaming – shaming to remember as well, to feel so sorry for your scabby little self back there in small people’s purgatory. The only writer I know of who has done justice to the experience is a science fiction ...”

“... audience’s sense of a forested landscape. Philip Henslowe’s list of stage properties for the Rose Theatre included a ‘bay tree’, ‘Tantalus’ tree’, and a ‘tree of golden apples’. In plays such as Lyly’s Galatea, Barton writes, ‘an entire woodland region’ seems to have been suggested by a single tree – the ‘fair oak’ situated at ...”

“... sun had dried it to a dusky goldbeater-skin film, cracked lozengewise by the heat; and as the wind rose, each lozenge rising a little, curled up at the edges as if it were a dumb tongue.’ This is very ‘Martian’, with its intent observation of the surface of things, its reliance on the slightly shallow brilliance of simile as opposed to the deeper, more ...”

“... Arafat based himself in Jordan. It was there that his revolution achieved its high-water mark in March 1968. At the Jordanian village of Karameh – ‘dignity’ in Arabic – Arafat and his Palestinian commandos achieved a moral victory similar to that of the Viet Cong during the Tet Offensive of the same year. Said Aburish writes of Arafat’s ...”

“... William Archer wrote, ‘for illness has neither tamed his mind nor aged his body. It has left its mark, however, in the pallor of his long oval face, with its wide-set eyes, straight nose, and thin-lipped, sensitive mouth, scarcely shaded by a light moustache, the jest and scorn of his more ribald intimates.’ No writer of the Victorian period has had more ...”

“... 1916, and after 1922 Bertolt) was diagnosed as a ‘nervous child’; serious illnesses left their mark: untreated bacterial pharyngitis led to rheumatic fever and from there to a weakened heart and Sydenham’s Chorea, which caused a facial grimace and uncontrolled movements. As an adolescent he was gaunt, emotionally erratic and intellectually ...”

“... Yeats’s ‘Cast a cold Eye/On Life, on Death./Horseman, pass by!’ or Rilke’s (translated) ‘Rose, oh pure contradiction, joy/of being no one’s sleep under so many/lids’, the sheer peevishness, the withdrawal, the implicit self-adulation, the up-yours-even-unto-the-elbow-and-from-beyond-the-grave of these great souls, Heaney’s (I don’t know what ...”

“... have been prevented if the guards had washed their hands. Mortality rates at the maternity clinics rose again after the handwashing regime was abandoned. Only some years later, in Germany, did it become common practice for doctors to wash their hands (they used chlorine).In her introduction to Stuck: How Vaccine Rumours Start – and Why They Don’t Go ...”

“... and yet his total incapacity for decent conduct’. The fellow was clearly a cad: in a telling mark of Edwardian social ostracism, he had to resign from his club. Although we like to congratulate ourselves on having more relaxed views about sex than our Edwardian predecessors, censoriousness can take many forms. The focus of 21st-century disapproval tends ...”

“... America’s ‘high priest of reconciliation’. The seventh of the nine children of Joseph and Rose Kennedy, he grew up in an environment in which winning was the thing that mattered. Second place, Joe constantly preached to his children, was for losers. Like many of those who have written about the Kennedy clan, Tye gives insufficient due to ...”

“... is that drives specialists in the genre to pursue certain titles down to the last distinguishing mark on the cover. (If, for example, you own a first edition of Elinor Brent-Dyer’s The School at the Chalet with a bit torn off the dust-jacket, you will likely be prepared to pay the earth – up to £100, according to Joseph Connolly – for an intact ...”