“... and accounted for her naturally nurturing role, while making her a stranger to such activities as war or science. In the 1930s the active principles found in testes and ovaries – hormones – were isolated and their chemical structures determined. The endocrinologists saw them as specifically ‘sex hormones’, and named them testosterone and ...”

“... sort of performance, Rapaport contends, played out symbolically the aspirations of the immigrant class and the rural poor (for his Milk Can Escape Houdini was chained inside a giant churn). She compares Houdini to Henry Brown, the slave who in 1849 had himself shipped in a postal crate from his Virginia plantation to freedom in Philadelphia. Brown, too, was ...”

“... but this is unlikely: the family kept a house in Kensington, and like many young women of her class in Ireland, she was already well used to life in London when in 1898 she enrolled at the Slade to study painting. For the first half of her long life, Gray knew everybody. At the Slade she met Wyndham Lewis, and soon made friends with the potter Bernard ...”

“... really know about it? To Lucien, the recovering city comes to seem like ‘a school play about war profiteering’ or ‘a propaganda movie’. And the propaganda seems to have done its job, though Lucien, preoccupied with Bush’s wars, stops throwing glamorous parties at his gallery. Things have changed a bit since Eisenberg wrote about the consequences ...”

“... of reciprocity – in this case, the hope that the gesture might forestall a disastrous war with the European power. The rhino was loaded in chains onto a Portuguese ship in Goa and delivered to King Manuel I, who had two bright ideas. The first was to organise a duel in Lisbon between the rhino and an already captive elephant. (Witnesses say the ...”

“... was a clear logic operating’ in the response to the financial crisis of 2008-9. ‘It was a class logic, admittedly – “Protect Wall Street first, worry about Main Street later” – but at least it had a rationale and one operating on a grand scale. To impute that same logic to the management of the Eurozone is to give Europe’s leaders too much ...”

“... guns, and for the first time had a chance to engage the enemy, if only at five miles up. By the war’s end the force, which at its peak had numbered 1,793,000, had won two George Crosses and 13 George Medals. A total of 1206 volunteers were either killed on duty or died from wounds. Piquant items from Graham McCann’s book about Dad’s Army have been ...”

“... Jews who tried to protect their daughter by putting her in a Catholic boarding school for working-class children, a place called the Holy Heart of Mary; as he meets a cousin of Dora’s and is given some family photographs; and finally as he registers Dora’s disappearance from her school in December 1941, and wonders what she can have done until she shows ...”

“... were a political gesture intended to show how serious Jack Straw was going to be about the war on drugs. The campaign was very active. I remember being confronted on the escalator at Holborn with a fly poster emblazoned with John Brock’s face – a face I hadn’t seen in more than ten years. The campaigners organised charity concerts, a sleep-out in ...”

“... takes the ‘ordinary life of a living person who died before his or her time in the Second World War and gives him or her a voice’. They have been a great success for a small publisher called Jupiter Press (the latest title has sold 40,000 copies this spring alone), hastening its acquisition by HarperCollins. Eve’s irritating editor, Amanda ...”

“... all his brothers in holy orders, his two sisters nuns. As was common for members of his patrician class, he was sent to the local Jesuit college in Como, but then rapidly strayed into the paths of enlightened philosophy and poetics. The promised land of Milton’s epics and Coalbrookdale’s engines became peculiarly appealing for this extreme ...”

“... arguments against identifying, say, the novel Ulysses either with any one copy of it or with the class of all copies or even with Joyce’s manuscript. Literary and musical works of art are not physical objects, or even classes of such objects, but, on Wollheim’s thesis, are ‘types’. Each copy or each performance is a ‘token’ of the respective ...”

“... in All That Man Is about a young Hungarian man, Balázs, who goes to London as muscle for a high-class call girl). But the core of the second István episode, symmetrical to the first, is his attempt to start a relationship with his uncle’s stepdaughter, Noémi, with whom he is ‘sort of in love’. Pages of droll conversation, revolving largely around ...”

“... were sometimes to be found lecturing in Sicily or Slovenia when they should have been teaching a class in New Jersey. At once prestigious and contentious, prized and reviled, theory was a way of amassing cultural capital for oneself as well as a source of genuinely exciting insights. Guileless souls content simply to read Jane Eyre now languished in the ...”

“... meant that ‘the sanctity of monarchy itself would soon be called into question,’ and civil war become imaginable. Though she is clear that ‘James I of England differed little from James VI of Scotland,’ Doran is not concerned with how James’s English self diverged from his Scottish one, but with the ways in which he differed – or didn’t ...”