“... quite say the animals agreed too. But he does pronounce the perverse verdict that, by 1900, ‘the weight of medical progress had crushed anti-vivisection.’ The depth of his misunderstanding is exposed in his passing remark that the Victorian anti-vivisection campaign was ‘perhaps the last major controversy in which lay people pretended to the competence ...”

“... swans. Women give birth on the stairs. A particular form of lovemaking, the man pressing his weight to the woman’s unresponsive back, recalls the executed youth hauled from the pit. (A long-haired sacrificial male god straight out of The Ballad of Reading Gaol.) Each element is made to vibrate against its contrary. Binding’s narratives, carefully ...”

“... Pinocchio that it is Collodi’s original that has come to seem like the revised version. As Richard Wunderlich and Thomas Morrissey write in their study of Pinocchio in America, ‘Pinocchio’ Goes Postmodern (2002), Collodi’s novel is now merely a ‘version among versions’: an adult version in their view, unsuitable for children, because no ...”

“... Purity. Man Two is successful, manipulative, priapic, with an aridity to his heart: the rock star Richard Katz in Freedom, the ‘famous internet outlaw’ Andreas Wolf in Purity. What seemed in The Corrections like a generous sharing of perspective between characters who, being related, can’t avoid acknowledging that they see things differently – the ...”

“... affliction or another.’ Many of his early maladies went undiagnosed. He was unable to gain weight. (Later, he was treated for this with injections of testosterone, which, Dallek speculates, might have enhanced his already healthy libido.) As a teenager he was so skinny that his classmates called him ‘Rat Face’. His older brother, Joe, was not only ...”

“... on a bed; or rather, three legs, an arm, a hand, a lower back and some indeterminate muslin-weight clothing in the process of being peeled off. The triumph of the photograph is that it’s both explicit and mysterious, intimate yet almost abstract: how, you wonder, are its subjects entwined? Which way up are they? Are they men or women or one of ...”

“... downright good a story … Too oily.’ ‘I was only thinking last night,’ she wrote in 1921 to Richard Murry, ‘people have hardly begun to write yet – now I mean prose … Aren’t they still cutting up sections rather than tackling the whole of a mind? … With all that one knows how much does one not know? … The unknown is far, far greater than the ...”

“... such strand was weak and incomplete, strands from associated fields of research could carry the weight instead, allowing the story to clamber up towards a plateau of coherence. What height, then, had Lewis-Williams arrived at? Not actually at ‘an origin of image-making’, as one of the book’s chapter titles brashly claimed: he never fully told us why ...”

“... life of the mediatised book group: Oprah’s Book Club had just returned from a year’s break and Richard and Judy were about to launch a UK version. (It was also a good year for coffee: by 2003 there were 425 Starbucks branches in the UK, up from 50 in 1998.) Consumers across the Anglophone world faithfully bought books, nearly finished them and then joined ...”

“... it likely that their language would spread very far: the late 16th-century English lexicographer Richard Mulcaster observed that the ‘English tung … is of small reatch; it stretcheth no further than this Island of ours, naie not there ouer all’ (Gaelic, Welsh and Cornish were current on the Celtic fringes). Objections to English – even among the ...”

“... so archaic, so self-confounding, so remote from the basic American consensus, ever got so far?’ Richard Hofstadter asked. Graffiti artists shared the intelligentsia’s disdain and defaced Goldwater’s campaign billboards, appending the word ‘Wing’ to his slogan ‘In Your Heart You Know He’s Right.’ Others added the coda: ‘In Your Guts You Know ...”

“... hedges and hides. Reason is a scoundrel, stupidity is direct and honest.’ This is the wording of Richard Pevear’s and Larissa Volokhonsky’s 1990 translation – the translation of the notes is by Edward Wasiolek. In David McDuff’s 1993 version we read: ‘The greater the stupidity, the greater the clarity. Stupidity is brief and guileless, while wit ...”

“... Freed earlier and more substantially than the British intellectual and student left from the dead weight of Communist orthodoxy, the American equivalent was able to enter into an alliance with disenfranchised Southern blacks which effectively desegregated the South in the decade following Rosa Parks’s refusal to give up her seat on an Alabama bus in ...”

“... mentioned Alicia Machado, Miss Universe 1996, whom Trump had called ‘Miss Piggy’ for gaining weight at the time and ‘Miss Housekeeping’ because she is Latina. Trump cannot stand to be criticised by someone he considers a ‘loser’ and Machado was on television telling tales of Trump’s humiliation of her twenty years ago. Five days later, at three ...”

“... the Hunter’ symposium in Chicago in 1966, Marshall Sahlins drew on research from the likes of Richard B. Lee among the !Kung of the Kalahari to argue that hunter-gatherers enjoyed the ‘original affluent society’. Even in the most marginal environments, he said, hunter-gatherers weren’t engaged in a constant struggle for survival, but had a leisurely ...”