“... made immediately clear) who goes by the name of the Great Lindemann. This is a day that will mark a brutal discontinuity in the Friedlands’ family life, and a moment when narrative particles throng together like sand grains at the neck of an hourglass. Here is another overlap with the world of McEwan’s fiction, the uneasy harnessing of short story ...”

“... took place against a background of right-wing death squads and threatened military coups. He rose quickly in the eyes of Haitians, but his stock plummeted in the United States. The New York Times, which relies heavily on informants who can speak English or French, had few kind words for him. ‘He’s a cross between the Ayatollah and Fidel,’ one ...”

“... 1960s, even in traditional rice economies such as China and Japan. The supply of wheat in China rose from fewer than 200 calories per person a day in 1961 to nearly 600 in 2009. Across Asia, the gradual substitution of wheat for rice has been a near universal marker of economic development.The human relationship with wheat is the subject of Catherine ...”

“... to reach Glasgow directly. Port Glasgow found its future as a shipbuilding town, making its mark in industrial history and the pantheon of Scottish innovation by launching Europe’s first commercial steamship, the Comet, in 1812. Migrant workers arrived from the Highlands and the rural Lowlands, and especially from the place Victorian writers nicely ...”

“... some pleasure in the middle. I call the parts ‘pleasure’, ‘terror’ and ‘routine’ to mark the fact that for me in those years routine too was a kind of emotion. Pleasure erupted into my life when fine weather allowed me to arrive on the pier, and I was allowed to walk up and down the row of black and silver boxes, which were arranged along the ...”

“... clothes, he revels in self-multiplication: ‘Brother, that’s I; that sits for me. Do you mark it? And I must stand here ready to make away myself yonder – I must sit to be killed and stand to kill myself. I could vary it not so little as thrice over again. ’T’as some eight returns like Michaelmas term.’ The dark surreal farce of this moment ...”

“... We Have that They Don’t: Anglo-American Poetic Relations since the War’, organised by Mark Ford and Steve Clark under the aegis of the University of London. Few 20th-century events, even in literary history alone, were at once important and relatively harmless. One was the rise and fall of Anglo-American literature. I use the term, in what may be ...”

“... of gannets’ skins, and were said to look like “feathered Mercuries”.’ Sometimes brogues rose above the knee, like fisherman’s waders: clearly their rusticity defined them, not their shape. These serviceable homemade brogues could translate a labourer into a nymph, a shepherd into a dweller in Arcadia; they were brimming over with the spirit of ...”

“... these systems isn’t trivial; it stitches into long-standing ethical debates. My young nieces, Rose and Claude, argue about whether or not they should say please and thank you to the family Alexa. Claude says it’s good to be polite because being polite is good, while Rose says it doesn’t matter because robots ...”

“... painting’s fault? Has it got something to do with how seeing normally proceeds, and with what mark-making consists in – Jeffrey Morgan’s mark-making – as a materialisation of seeing? Carson decides he wants to see Morgan’s painting in a better ...”

“... in farming communities reported experiencing orgasm as a result of animal contact, a number that rose to 65 per cent in some rural settings. In his study of American women in 1953, Kinsey found that just under 4 per cent had engaged in sexual activity with an animal since adolescence; almost all these cases involved dogs or cats. In 1974, the sexologist ...”

“... clutch of recent biographies has toppled several notable royal icons from their pedestals. Kenneth Rose depicted George V as an ogre so boorish and philistine that in retrospect he appears almost pathetically comical. In his books on Edward VIII, Michael Bloch has washed a great deal of the Abdication dirty linen in public, and much of the mud has stuck to the ...”

“... to the point of – horrors! – being no analyst at all, but a therapist. The new feminism rose up against the man who had reported that little girls and little boys set out different play configurations in the consulting room. Overall, the fact that his work was, by intention, interdisciplinary, made him the target for accusations of lack of ...”

“... those artists he trusted’. Ominous. At every turning-point in Nijinsky’s career a question-mark hangs over the matter of who was responsible for what happened: when he stalked out of the Imperial Ballet after being reprimanded for dancing Albrecht without trunks over his tights, had he really offended the sensibilities of an Archduchess, or had this ...”

“... of the obvious connections between the life and the death of us. And how the rituals by which we mark the things that only happen to us once, birth and death, or maybe twice in the case of marriage, carry the same emotional mail – a message of loss and gain, love and grief, things changed utterly. And just as bringing the crapper indoors has made faeces an ...”