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“... of the poètes maudits. He was born in Salzburg in 1887, and grew up in a comfortable middle-class home. The picturesque, musical city is a constant presence in his cloying, Fin-de-Siècle early verse, some of which is included here: Ancient squares in sunlit silence. Deep engrossed in blue and gold Dreamlike gentle nuns are hastening Under sultry ...”

“... in Le Havre: something of what life was like in that port of entry during the First World War, for a boy keen on identifying the nationalities and even the regiments of foreign soldiers disembarking in it, is to be gathered from the sixth of the novels included here, Un rude hiver. The boy Queneau came, for reasons that I don’t know he ever spelled ...”

“... the wild grotesque of Carl Hiaasen. There’s nothing mythical about its depiction of lower-middle-class American life. The crimes are committed either for prosaic reasons – life insurance features prominently – or they are motiveless and shocking acts of violence: an 18-month-old baby is killed after being accidentally kidnapped during a routine car ...”

“... Neville depicted Porter as Seth, a knuckle-cracking, gawky Australian detester of ‘the English Class Thing’. Jannice went on writing to Micklem after her marriage. She and Porter had two daughters, but there were quarrels, resentments, silences. Each had affairs. By the 1970s, when Porter was establishing himself as a poet, the marriage was in ...”

“... legacy of 17th-century radicalism. By the 18th century, the Good Old Cause of the Civil War had been revised to meet contemporary tastes and susceptibilities, with Puritanism given a classical, if only partly Augustan veneer. Ironically, in 18th-century Ireland it was Presbyterians of this classical republican stamp – not Catholics – who tended ...”

“... you look like a clown or give you heavy metal poisoning. Even so, at the start of the First World War, the market for ‘commercial colour cosmetics’ (i.e. make-up) remained ‘small compared to that for skin creams’ – in large part because ‘face paint’ was associated with ‘prostitutes or, at best, actresses’. Yet by the time the Second World ...”

“... to say – asserted that she was suffering from ‘uterine disease’, the catch-all for middle-class women whose behaviour was out of line, especially those women who liked men in the way that men like women. Parliament took Edward’s cause to heart and the Divorce Act was amended on his behalf, allowing him to appear as a mere witness rather than a ...”

“... over in the British Library, Marx is making a pig’s ear of the history paper. His analysis of class societies proves ‘flawed’, ‘naive’ and ‘ludicrous’. So what led people to think that these three supposed classics were so marvellous in the first place? Various explanations, such as Myles Burnyeat’s suggestion that a great text lends itself ...”

“... that these people must now eat for us?” So he fell back into talking about the 1970s war against Ian Smith. This meant nothing at all to young people and it addressed none of today’s problems.’ Second, in past elections Zanu-PF had distributed food and seeds to those with a Zanu-PF card: if you didn’t vote Zanu-PF you didn’t eat. ‘But ...”

“... that ‘there is in England, as in other countries, a fascist world: the world of lower-middle-class conservatives who have no intelligence but a deep belief in violence as a sign of self-importance,’ and who, moreover, ‘hate foreigners, especially if they come from “inferior” races’. The sociological precision of the snobbish anathema is unique ...”

“... man, Banham became, like them, a celebrated outsider – a hit-man turned target. Born in working-class Norwich in 1922, Banham trained to be an aeronautical engineer, but failed the examinations and ditched the profession during the war. After a few years as a local art critic, he left for London in 1949, soon to study ...”

“... who stole from him, or who tried to escape, despite the fact that, fighting in the American Civil War at an earlier stage of his career, he had himself deserted, twice – once from each side. He shot quite a lot of other Africans dead, usually because they objected to his marching through their countries with huge entourages, which made the Africans ...”

“... divine attributes and intentions (‘consider the lilies of the field, how they grow’); middle-class and aristocratic ladies for whom it was a desirable feminine ‘accomplishment’. Then there were the globally distributed worthies who wanted the richness and particularities of their local flora to be formally acknowledged, and who sought personal ...”

“... to remind the public that he had been Khomeini’s prime minister in the ‘heroic days’ of war and revolution. Besides his reputation as a competent administrator, he had nationalised a host of industries, launched a rural construction programme, drafted a progressive labour law, advocated land reform, and introduced wartime price controls and ...”

“... this without finding the secret service, Dreyfus’s superior officers and the former minister of war incompetent or much worse, and they weren’t going to do that. The verdict was rendered on 9 September 1899 and ten days later Dreyfus was formally pardoned for what he had not done. A year later an amnesty was declared that let the conspirators off ...”