“... Christian martyrs, monks, Abelard and Héloïse, the troubadours, Dante. Next she moves on to David Hume, Goethe, Byron, Casanova, before concluding with a smattering of Netflix scripts and YouTube comments. Is this a history of love? Or a history of certain ideas about love? As the historian of China Eugenia Lean has argued, the ‘single ...”

“... and programmatic engagement with the ‘elemental’ – sea-voyages and disasters, islands, rock, marine biology. I wonder, too, if one critic’s ‘appeased self-knowledge’ might not be another’s ‘complacency’. In The Price of Stone (1985), for instance, given in its entirety in New Selected Poems, Murphy has several poems about the building ...”

“... She and Scott had been daring each other to dive off higher and higher pinnacles of rock at Antibes, and their host noticed how frightened he was, and yet determined to follow her. The swallow dive was perfected by the diminutive American Desjardins, and immortalised in the Olympic film sequence of Leni Riefenstahl. I am delighted to find that ...”

“... more manacled by the observances of etiquette.’ On less grand occasions they met the painter David, an Englishman who had befriended Charlotte Corday at her trial, and Charles James Fox – ‘rather lourd and maladroit’. With the help of a young American, Margaret and Katherine visited Tom Paine, ‘up half a dozen flights of stairs, in a remote part ...”

“... South-West (Death comes for the Archbishop), turn-of-the-17th-century Quebec (Shadows on the Rock), antebellum Virginia (Sapphira and the Slave Girl) and an unfinished novel about Avignon in the 14th century. For her the past came closer to genuine goodness, nobility and the virtues of stability, innocence and grace. The present she saw as ...”

“... and lions, with titles like ‘The Old Warrior’ (a lion, not a Masai). These are the work of David Shepherd and Simon Combes, who have donated reproduction fees to wild-life conservation funds. They are relevant to the text, in which the Baroness zestfully celebrates the beasts she killed, and also relevant to the tears of the moviegoers, enchanted by ...”

“... airport: men unthinkingly aim at them, reducing the amount of urine that ends up on the floor.David Cameron’s government, hungry for a new political idea but reluctant to rock any ideological boats, was quick to seize on ‘nudges’, along with its ‘Big Society’ vision of volunteering and social enterprise. What ...”

“... the emergency has landed the narrator not only in hospital but within the domestic contours of a David Sedaris essay. In the new novel, one of the only references to that earlier life is the mention of a syphilis infection contracted in Eastern Europe; the doctors investigate this as one possible cause of the aortic dissection, before ruling it out. Even ...”

“... culture to which he belongs and of the morality which enables him to sit in judgment on the very rock out of which he was hewn. He appears, however, to have missed the further irony that, by ascribing to Israel the creative power which invented their God and so became responsible for initiating the religious traditions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, he ...”

“... or less complete. Peter Burton and Richard Smith have added chapters on film, the gay scene and rock music, for which Baker had left notes. The result is not just about drag, nor yet about female impersonation, and doesn’t even confine itself to the performing arts. Besides the contemporary pieces, Drag has fascinating material on early English ...”

“... there is nothing to catch anyone on the raw in the questions. They are soft and sugary. They will rock no boats and call forth no hard answers. And yet, despite this softness at its core, the novel exerts such poetic power and such pleasures of form and such potency in the final dawn scene at Curlow Creek – where all the ambiguities are left floating in ...”

“... and turn them over to make sure nothing is hidden underneath. So one day they tied a string to a rock rigged to an old water bottle with a power source inside attached to some old mortar rounds.’ Last November, I was in Fallujah, in the place where two American contractors had been shot and killed, when a ground-to-air missile, fired from date groves near ...”

“... and he would return to the displacement over and over (and over) in his fiction. Here are the boy David Kern’s parents, George and Elsie, fighting about it in the early story ‘Pigeon Feathers’: Mother’s anger touched David’s face; his cheeks burned guiltily. Just by staying in the living room he associated ...”

“... dreamed up much of the look, the attitude and the lyrics, though not the sound. A full year before David Bowie adopted the same hair style, Westwood had her hair bleached blonde and cut ‘coupe-sauvage’ style: tufty, asymmetrical and barmy-looking. She went to America and dressed the New York Dolls. Together, she and McLaren assembled the Sex Pistols, whom ...”

“... with the mad scientists of musique concrète and spread into pop in ways that demanded either rock star-size funds – only the likes of Kate Bush could afford the first ‘computer musical instruments’ – or, in the case of hip-hop, dexterity and staying power with mixers and turntables. Cheaper units like the E-mu SP-1200, launched in 1987, made it ...”