“... A Senate subcommittee put publishers on the stand: ‘Here is your May issue. This seems to be a man with a bloody axe holding a woman’s head up which has been severed from her body. Do you think that’s in good taste?’ Fifteen comics companies went out of business in the summer of 1954 alone.Generations of fans have had their revenge. Wertham is ...”

“... one black, one grey, one blue – and six copies of a volume of poems by Champerret, Chants de la Dordogne, published in 1941 by a small press in Perigueux, Editions du Noir (presumably a reference to Perigord Noir, the region south of Perigueux, which takes its name from the black oaks that grow there). The poems were written in rhyming ...”

“... discussion as to why the world is caught up in a ‘global rush to commemorate atrocities’, as Paul Williams puts it in Memorial Museums (Berg, £19.99). There is no doubting the evidence. A non-exhaustive list at the beginning of the book includes 24 museums, sites or artefacts marking atrocities, disasters and ‘crimes against humanity’, of which only ...”

“... Paul Celan was born in 1920 as Paul Antschel, to German-speaking Jewish parents in Czernowitz, the capital of the Bukovina: ‘a posthumously born Kakanier,’ he once said of himself (the city and province of his birth had been ceded to Romania in 1918, when the Habsburg Empire was broken up ...”

“... Swift showing himself the master of cultivated and highly-wrought disgust for the female body, and de Sade thrown in for a make-weight. Like the century which follows, it breeds some despicable doggerel, compared to which Pitt-Kethley’s version of ‘Eskimo Nell’ is a marvel of freshness and rhymer’s ingenuity. The 19th century is the century of ‘bawdy ...”

“... Napoleon Bonaparte and his chief diplomat, Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand, are usually seen as the oddest of history’s odd couples. One personified boldness, ambition and overblown operatic passion; the other, subtlety, irony and world-weary cynicism. One displayed such restless physical energy that contemporaries repeatedly reached for that newly hatched adjective ‘electric’ to describe him; the other was sickly, pallid and had a club foot ...”

“... know what to expect from a book called The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World, by Geoffrey de Ste Croix, whose career as an ancient historian began after the war when he was a mature student at University College, London under the great A. H. M. Jones. Jones’s Athenian Democracy (1960) remains the best analysis (and defence) of that historic ...”

“... The Old Way was Realist, teaching that universals have a real existence: the notion ‘Man’ represents something real, individual men are imperfect copies of it. Realists invoked Scotus and Aquinas. The rival Moderni had swept across Europe from Oxford and Paris. They were Nominalists, teaching that universals such as ‘...”

“... discredit Lawrence’s advocacy of sexual polarity. Balbert catches them quoting out of context: Paul Morel’s patronising view of the suffrage movement is not Lawrence’s, but part of a dialogue with Clara Dawes which will eventually reveal Clara’s emotional failure; Miriam Leivers’s polemic against sexual inequality reveals her lack of ‘healthy ...”

“... time, my mother was stopped in the street by a neighbour and asked: ‘Is your husband a black man?’ Not only were blacks as rare in Ulster as Albanians, but the neighbour in question was well-acquainted with my father’s appearance. ‘No, he’s English, actually,’ my mother replied, to which the neighbour returned: ‘Is he walking the ...”

“... mood-changer. Here are two examples, one English and one American, both extremely accomplished. Paul Bailey, with several distinguished novels to his credit already, is a master of this mode. The action of Old Soldiers, the Aristotelian space from the beginning through the middle to the end, occupies only a couple of weeks (and 120 thinly printed ...”

“... practice. It is as if we had only the lyrics, without recordings or melodies, of Bob Dylan, Paul Simon and Joan Baez – and those only in indifferent Portuguese translations. Most of their power and all of their subtlety would vanish. For similar reasons, the troubadours have more often been honoured as cultural pioneers than admired as ...”

“... the conclusion of the war: was it inevitable that it would end in independence (supposedly de Gaulle’s own belief)? To answer these questions we need access to contemporary documents, and the Service Historique de l’Armée de Terre (created by Louvois in 1668), which had ...”

“... forces policing the social appearance of the subject. Exactly! Had Claude Cahun not existed, Man – or a Gender Theorist – would have had to invent her.Something more is needed now: some real homage. The images remain: freakish, unsettling, impossible to ignore – Scenes from a Funhouse Mirror. In one photo the mercurial Cahun impersonates a bald ...”

“... many of these, including volcanoes with precise eschatological trimmings (‘I saw an elderly man in braces showered by sulfur and brimstone’) and a negative version that goes not with a bang but with a whimper: It is not like a massacre, not like a bomb; there is no blood, nobody’s being mangled; it is just a swelling, a steady increase, all over ...”