“... in the dawn Cheered when the galleys raced towards Aegina, Our patriots now lean on the car horn. The little motor-boats from the marina Are teeming in each other’s wash like spawn. All wish the Fleet fair winds for Argentina. Invincible looks worthy of its name. The battleship Repulse once looked the same. I don’t doubt our atomic submarines ...”

“... In​ 1940, James Baldwin visited the painter Beauford Delaney at his studio on Greene Street. Baldwin was fifteen and a high school student; the meeting had been arranged by a friend. ‘Beauford was the first living, walking proof, for me, that a Black man could be an artist,’ Baldwin wrote later. In Delaney, a gay black artist from Knoxville, 23 years his senior and living downtown, rather than in Harlem, Baldwin saw a possible future for himself ...”

“... Cecil delicately began to forge a political relationship with Elizabeth’s probable successor, James VI of Scotland, he kept his activities secret. Years later, justifying this course of action, he observed that her ‘age and orbity’ – meaning her childlessness – ‘joined to the jealousy of her sex, might have moved her to think ill of that which ...”

“... in a shapeless, grey, many-zippered jacket with a camera swinging across his belly and I honk the horn. I haven’t met Paul, the photographer I’m going to be working with, before. I guess it’s him, and it is. A shy, proud, diligent Irishman who hoards his smiles, then doles them out, like a kid sharing sweets. Inside, a row of bobbing, grinning American ...”

“... estate agents hammers home the point. Bullough peppers his book with allusions to Harry Potter, James Bond, Asterix and Tintin. Depending on your twee-tolerance, this is either charming or patronising. But his real strength is as a reporter, with an ear for a good quote and a bonhomie that loosens the tongues of even the most cynical of Moneyland’s ...”

“... and medicine murders in grisly detail but paid more attention to what it considered, like King James I, to be the real threat of witchcraft. Another anthropologist, Isak Niehaus, has since published a superb account of witch-hunts in the area, while taking a more sceptical view of witchcraft. Now Colin Murray, an anthropologist, and Peter Sanders, a ...”

“... are of much more importance to recent British history than liberal empiricism has allowed. Pamela Horn’s study is thorough, sensible social history by a scholar who has delved into a vast range of primary sources. It is a very good example of the type of specialised study on which Arthur Marwick, James Cronin and Jane ...”

“... of mighty Workings in a distant Mart. While treating Trieste, Ms Morris invokes these words from James Joyce: ‘And trieste, ah trieste ate I my liver!’ This is a line from Finnegans Wake, but more frequently read in Ellmann’s biography, where it heads the chapter on Joyce in that city. What does it mean? Picking up the pun on triste, she thinks that ...”

“... In​ autumn 2000, the critic, memoirist and biographer James Atlas brought forth a Life of Saul Bellow that augured to be the literary event of the season, a crowning glory for author and subject. Bellow: A Biography was Atlas’s highly anticipated successor to his wunderkind biography of the brilliant, bedevilled Delmore Schwartz, whose combustible presence served as the inspiration for Von Humboldt Fleisher in Bellow’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Humboldt’s Gift ...”

“... with Frankopan’s) is that they may contain a warning for our own time. Yet as James Belich writes, ‘historians are extremely uncomfortable with the idea that natural forces in some way circumscribe human agency.’ In The World the Plague Made he has a hard case to make, and a somewhat heartless one: that the Black Death – perhaps ...”

“... there is always the reality of a certain outsider-dom. Take the beautiful American train horn, the crushed klaxon peal you can hear almost anywhere in the States: at the end of my street at night-time, across a New Hampshire valley, in some small Midwestern town – a crumple of notes, blown out on an easy, loitering wail3. It sounds less like a ...”

“... pockets are embroidered with a woman in a scarlet slit of a skirt, a man with boots and a big horn, and a dead animal. Here is 17th-century filigree from Germany – silver wires twisted into the shape of a heart – and 20th-century jangle from Paris, supplied by Paco Rabanne’s chainmail belt bag.‘Inside out’ it is not. No unexpected overarching ...”

“... Ramsay and Fergusson included only two of Fergusson’s English poems (and none of Ramsay’s); James Robertson’s Selected Poems, published in 2000, and the most accessible edition of Fergusson’s poetry in print, contains only four poems in English. The notable exception was Matthew McDiarmid’s complete edition (1954-56), in which the English and ...”

“... Philip Gross’s The Ice Factory. Clogged webs are slack-strung tennis nets; convulvulus, frail horn gramophones for bees – the opening lines assert, pulling out all the stops, but also requiring too much of that comma (which stands in for a plural verb but is asked to be singular), and perhaps also of gramophones, which are more commonly listened to ...”

“... the people in the end is not a being but a theory’. The book has a cast of thousands: William James, Théodore Flournoy, Morton Prince (who failed to detect sexual wishes in his patients’ dreams and was given his marching orders), Eugen Bleuler, (Miss) Frank Miller (altruistically given to analysing her own poems), Otto Weininger (a suicide), Johann ...”