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“... This year Zaha Hadid won the Pritzker Prize. The award was founded by Jay Pritzker who owned the Hyatt hotel chain – not that the winners of the prize have produced much that looks at all like the buildings which underwrite it. It is given annually to an architect who has, among other things, ‘produced consistent and significant contributions to humanity and the built environment ...”

“... research Claire Tomalin draws – concludes that Dickens visited Nelly for elocution lessons. Peter Ackroyd has put an only slightly less pure interpretation on the connection: Dickens and Nelly enjoyed (or suffered) a ‘sexless’ marriage, in which she played out the part of the idealised virgin bride. An opposite line which traces itself back to ...”

“... theoretical approach to its subject. The title, suggested by Adorno’s friend and publisher Peter Suhrkamp, evokes a musical analogy in which a supportive accompaniment rather than conceptual domination of its subjects is the goal. Appropriately, the collection’s opening piece is a spirited defence of ‘The Essay as Form’ against the traditional ...”

“... It would be interesting to place Jay McInerney and David Holbrook as neighbours at E.M. Forster’s imaginary table. Both novelists are fascinated by decadence – that much they have in common. But their diagnoses and anatomies of the decadent condition are quite different; worlds apart, to use Holbrook’s dominant image ...”

“... to the discovery that the list of the BWMA’s honorary members – there’s Jilly Cooper, Peter Hitchens, Norris McWhirter, mad Patrick Moore – includes the name of the universally adored J.K. Rowling OBE. Is this not taking the antique Englishness of Harry Potter just a little too far? But then I remember that the ‘feasts’ served up at Hogwarts ...”

“... struggle for political reform. Despard’s cause was illuminated from a new direction by Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker in The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (2000), which devoted a chapter to his formative adventures in the Caribbean and Central America together with his wife ...”

“... fashion. We were thought to take after our fathers, who venerated Magnus Magnusson and Peter Jay, anybody who looked like the besuited officials that a century of colonial education had taught them to defer to. On Friday nights, when many teenagers were out necking bottles of cheap cider or haggling for lovebites in discos, we would be at home ...”

“... A diagnosis​ of mental illness has many meanings, not all of them clearly stated. It confines itself to the language of the clinic but its reach extends far beyond it. It confers many, often hard-won, legal rights to employment, treatment, educational support and state benefits; equally it can remove your children from you, oblige you to undergo treatment against your will or take away your liberty ...”

“... a professor; the rise of the serious study of historiography; and the set of changes which Martin Jay has called ‘the linguistic turn’ in historical method – the shift not simply towards a greater preoccupation with language, but also towards ‘literature’ (in its broadest sense), and so towards culture. The ‘linguistic turn’ was not simply an ...”

“... Joyce Johnson was Jack Kerouac’s lover during a brief but crucial period in his career. She met him on a blind date fixed up by Allen Ginsberg in January 1957, nine months before the publication of his second novel. Outside a small circle of avant-garde writers and artists and drinking buddies, Kerouac then had few admirers. In 1950, under the name John Kerouac, he had published The Town and the City, a lengthy, rather formal account of his childhood and youth, heavily influenced by Thomas Wolfe ...”

“... of Pervitin in the Blitzkrieg; he cites and quotes the work of historians such as Werner Pieper, Peter Steinkamp and Karl-Heinz Frieser. Blitzed adds some new and valuable archival detail but Ohler’s most original contribution is stylistic: he puts Pervitin at the centre of the narrative and the way he talks about it draws on the sensibilities of today’s ...”

“... Hall). Although there have been some nuanced treatments of Basaglia’s work (for example, in Peter Sedgwick’s Psycho Politics), the perception of him in British psychiatry was predominantly formed by hostile assessments that emerged in the 1980s as part of the backlash against ‘antipsychiatry’, particularly Martin Roth and Jerome Kroll’s The ...”

“... place. It is supposed to characterise earthquakes, the ‘punctuated equilibrium’ that Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldridge claim for biological evolution, stock prices, neural activity, and the movement of cars on the M25. In 1987, along with Chao Tang and Kurt Wiesenfeld, Bak published a technical account of self-organised criticality which, he ...”

“... to strip, but the charming detail from Giacomo Jaquerio’s painting that adorns the jacket of Jay Olshansky and Bruce Carnes’s book suggests that this is the convention.) Immortality is not synonymous with eternal youth, however, and Olshansky and Carnes remind us of one of the less well-known stories in Gulliver’s Travels. It involves a tiny minority ...”

“... isolated incident. Two years ago a group of students at St Hugh’s put on blackface to illustrate Jay-Z and Kanye West’s ‘Niggas in Paris’ as part of a ‘song titles’-themed bop. Only 3.9 per cent of Oxford’s professors have a Black and Minority Ethnic background; even at Cambridge the figure is 6.4 per cent. Undergraduates can still complete a ...”