“... Biscay, through the Channel and into the North Sea. It was bound for Hull. By lunchtime on 6 May, more than a month after setting out from Vietnam, it was steaming up the Humber.I wanted to confirm what was on board, so I looked on the internet and found a pub, the Humber Tavern, in the village of Paull, that seemed to have a good view of the water. I ...”

“... casts of her body, and articulated her skeleton. They may be intended as evidence, but they look more like trophies; either way, they are invitations to work backwards, to find out what the child’s life was, and how, in death, she came to be here.She was exhibited as Miss Crachami, the Sicilian Fairy, or Sicilian Dwarf. Not much is known about her; what ...”

“... I was very drawn to. I’m sorry now that we allowed English male shyness to stop us speaking more freely about some of the things that mattered to us most (not that he, ambivalent Manxman, would easily submit to the indignity of being lumped with ‘the English’), but that courtesy of his could sometimes make too much directness seem intrusive. Our ...”

“... point, having no English grammar, I consult a copy of Kennedy’s Latin primer, filched more than thirty years ago from Giggleswick School. It’s only today that I notice that some schoolboy half a lifetime ago has painstakingly converted The Revised Latin Primer into ‘The Revised Man Eating Primer’. Perhaps it is the same boy who has inscribed ...”

“... Ukraine has produced the largest and swiftest mass movement of women since the Second World War. More than four million women have been displaced within Ukraine and around the same number have fled the country. Many of those who left, congregating in towns and cities in Poland, or taking buses and trains to other European capitals, went reluctantly. Their ...”

“... equal measure. Said’s critical perspective gave both Europeans and non-Europeans a shrewder and more unillusioned sense of the subterranean ways in which power operated through the cultures of empire, and is now so familiar that it’s easily taken for granted. This would be foolish – Eurocentrism is alive and well, and takes new and unexpected forms in ...”

“... misogyny. When two of them married it came as a great surprise to their friends; they seemed more at home (or more happily desperate) as uneasy bachelors than fathers or husbands. All three, indeed, if this is any of our business, may have died virgins. One of them took the view that ‘I have no ambitions and no ...”

“... ready to return to Dublin and the humblest employment; but once back home, he writes to his friend Thomas McGreevy dismissing the problem with much self-conscious wordplay, going on to reflect at length on poetry and painting. One of the high points of the first volume is an unusually candid letter to McGreevy in 1935 in which Beckett, now in Jungian analysis ...”

“... invisible companion, helping him to change trains at ‘Milano Centrale’ (‘faster by far and more splendid than Euston or Paddington’), giving him a cheery wave, and then, on the final stages of the journey, ‘watching the pink almond blossom’ as the train speeds south to Naples beside the deep blue sea. Cambridge, when Raymond goes up as an ...”

“... people’s experience of the legal system to the way people washed their sheets, and is a far more exciting book than either the title or the rather dull cover would suggest. For a short period, the mystery of these letters became a national news story that generated four separate trials and, as Hilliard writes, ‘demanded ...”

“... near mythic status. By every metric, the miners’ strike was the bigger dispute. It involved more men, lasted much longer and induced state intervention so vicious that certain scenes are embedded in the national consciousness: the Battle of Orgreave, where thousands of police, led by mounted officers, repeatedly charged picketers, took place in June ...”

“... the conviction of Jonathan King for offences against young men dating back twenty-five years and more. While it features some of the police involved, it manages not to ask the pertinent question: if these 15-year-old boys had been 15-year-old girls and romping round in Rolls-Royces even more famous than those of Jonathan ...”

“... and of the headmastership of James Prince Lee, a future bishop of Manchester and a disciple of Thomas Arnold, whose educational ideals – the strenuous pursuit of knowledge and the cultivation of elevated tone and Christian character – Edward was to perpetuate in his own career. When he was still a student at Cambridge in 1850 his mother and eldest ...”

“... of resistance to his behaviour, since everyone looked as if they were having such a good time. More institutions and public figures were to follow – from news anchors and comedians to MPs, publishers, schoolteachers and Benedictine monks – but they had less screen potential. I couldn’t help feeling that the actresses were once again being asked to ...”

“... or no danger to the country. If asked, in fact, they would probably agree with the philosopher Thomas Nagel, who has said that you cannot trust a person who never lies about sex. The case against Clinton was also doomed by pervasive hypocrisy. The media that thrives on sex and violence postured shamelessly as Clinton’s moral judge. Some ...”