“... in a cinema behind the screen (a woman who was then a little girl remembers what was playing the day they delivered the box: The Road to Bali, Rear Window and Abbott and Costello in the Foreign Legion), taken to a major’s house, shifted to a colonel’s office. These movements are top secret, but wherever the body goes, candles and flowers ...”

“... Yeats, Eliot, Auden and George Barker. Then, on leaving school, he published a novel, Opening Day, and before long his work could be found in the small magazines of his time such as Geoffrey Grigson’s New Verse and his friend Roger Roughton’s Contemporary Poetry and Prose, Browsing in Zwemmer’s as a schoolboy, he had encountered Surrealism in its ...”

“... Do you believe that Jesus of Nazareth was born in Bethlehem, thanks to a Roman census, on a day corresponding to 25 December, at the end of a year corresponding to 1 BC, that all those fireworks, a few weeks ago, were marking his 2000th birthday in a meaningful way, that his mother was a virgin, that he rode into Jerusalem on an ass? Well, I am afraid ...”

“... one US senator later accused him of forging a ‘hero image of Castro, in which all the virtues of Robin Hood and Thomas Jefferson, of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, were contained in a single man’. Matthews’s series caused an uproar in Cuba: Batista himself was enraged by it, and one of his top advisers dismissed Matthews’s reporting as ‘a ...”

“... books Fen’s domesticity is erratically revived: ‘He went home and spent the remainder of the day eating, sleeping, reading, vilifying his children and practising desultorily on the French horn.’ Later in the same book, Frequent Hearses, Fen laments the arrival of the long vacation because there will be no demands on his time. The happily married ...”

“... scholarship and money, this particular millennium construction would not have seen the light of day for many years. Louis has not produced an encyclopedia. Anyone searching for information about events in specific countries, or on the origins of current crises, would be seriously disappointed. Only Ireland gets a decent showing over the centuries ...”

“... Tennant. In her portraits she is usually looking away, eyes lifted or lowered, but on Christmas Day 1883, aged 21, she stopped to consider herself: What am I? A little woman with grey eyes with corners to them … & a nose with a lump in the middle, & a square jaw and a nameless complexion with small ears almost round & an ordinary neat figure & next to no ...”

“... autism all around us. The criteria for being autistic have radically expanded since Kanner’s day. This is not just a conceptual change, but also a discovery that took time. When there was no diagnosis of autism, you could not be said to have grown out of it, or recovered, or been cured. Kanner followed up his first patients. None recovered; two survived ...”

“... as like as not. We know what they did: rape and pillage. Along with the Crusaders, King Arthur and Robin Hood, they form a major part of our medieval imaginary. For fifty years now specialists in Viking studies have been trying to convince us, without much success, that ‘Viking’ is a job description, not an ethnic category, that behind the generic figure ...”

“... seven years to do it. (The Bloody Sunday inquiry took 12 years to investigate the events of one day.) More than 150 witnesses gave evidence, and more than 150,000 documents have been examined. Even Chilcot seems to have underestimated the scale of the task. In 2012, he told David Cameron that the report was ‘likely to be more than a million ...”

“... in a sleazy, sex-filled prequel to James’s novella. Young rightly devotes several pages to Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Man, but Offbeat passes over it as being too well known and moves straight on to The Appointment, a completely forgotten horror film from 1980 in which ‘Edward Woodward comes the closest he ever would to reprising one of his most ...”

“... bin overflowing with blood-soaked tampons viewed through a gauzy curtain, while Vikki Hodgett and Robin Weltsch covered the walls and cupboard doors of their Nurturant Kitchen with moulded foam breasts. Sandy Orgel’s Surrealist-inspired linen closet had a female mannequin trapped between its shelves. Faith Wilding’s Crochet Environment, known as the ...”

“... through the year of better than 60 per cent. It will be the opening night of Jurassic Park every day at BL 2000. There will be ticket touts in the Euston Road offering desperate American scholars seats for arm-and-a-leg prices. Young women with thesis deadlines will be prostituting their bodies for a carrel. If you want a foretaste of what the BL of the ...”

“... about. During Giacometti’s visits to London in 1955, 1964 and 1965 I saw him practically every day, whereas Lord, who saw him much more regularly in Paris than I did, was not around much, if at all. So the treatment of those London visits provides a clue to the quality of Lord’s research. I go into the detail that follows with some reluctance: the ...”

“... all it is an account of how Ali – who, like comrades such as Perry Anderson, Richard Gott and Robin Blackburn, is now in his eighties – has sustained a particular kind of political life, which younger leftists are unlikely to be able to enjoy.Ali’s first volume of memoirs, Street Fighting Years: An Autobiography of the Sixties, was published in ...”