“... seem to be preoccupied by gender. It is a theme crucial equally to Duncan McLean’s novel Bunker Man and to Kathleen Jamie’s poetry collection The Queen of Sheba. It is insistent in W.N. Herbert’s poem ‘Featherhood’ and Janice Galloway’s Foreign Parts. It bridges writing as different as the poetry of Carol Ann Duffy, Kate Clanchy or David ...”

“... story from my mother at an early age, when I was told that the alleged messiah was a confidence man, a scoundrel, one of the real villains of Jewish history. There was a period of a century or more after the events themselves when blame and then more blame was heaped on the pretended messiah and his leading propagandist, Nathan of Gaza. New research in the ...”

“... century; that it was painted in Spanish Town, the colony’s capital; and that it showed a man called Francis Williams, about whom Long had written a whole chapter in his celebrated History of Jamaica (1774). Not only that, he says, but when Long was writing that chapter, he had this painting in front of him and was describing it. The dealer, Jack ...”

“... right objective scenario for the point to be made. As an artist he had negative capability. As a man he was rather ordinary: that is to say, he had a warm heart, was kind, dutiful, devoted and vulnerable, often a trifle absurd, never in the least diabolic, good rather than bad. He was emphatically not, as Tolstoy certainly was, in the ...”

“... shot Mark Duggan is to be returned to firearms duty just as was the officer who shot Jean Charles de Menezes. The Met doesn’t seem to understand what is wrong with this. It’s just one word. Tact.20 February. The walls of the sitting room and the study in Gloucester Crescent are just as I decorated them nearly half a century ago. I have always been quite ...”

“... his anus is reproduced in evidence) to the fatwa against Salman Rushdie, to the way the exposé of Paul deMan’s early anti-Semitic writings has been used to discredit his literary criticism. These examples sprout sub-examples, often weirdly illustrated with helpful photographs. To bolster the uncontroversial claim ...”

“... and is fond of dressing up in other people’s personalities. After the Almighty, after St Paul – for whom he confesses ‘a strange liking’ – his most influential model, or imaginative icon, is John Bunyan, whose life and work obsess him. Bunyan is ‘this dreamer and penman’, ‘the most prominent man of ...”

“... scientific, social and literary thought during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and Paul Weindling’s Health, Race and German Politics documents how many of these same ideas contributed to the nightmare of Nazi Germany. Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection set much of the context for the general discourse on degeneracy. At ...”

“... with a tug at the heartstrings that drew audiences worldwide into the ebb and flow of the Little Man’s campaign against oppression and neglect. Jacques Tati as Monsieur Hulot in ‘Les Vacances de M. Hulot’ (1953). In the decades after the Second World War, another supremely accomplished mime artist with a lively ...”

“... Anna Karina have about them the personal, spontaneous quality of a home movie. Following A bout de souffle (1960), his first film and one whose success with the public he has never repeated, Godard cast Karina as the female lead in Le Petit Soldat (1960; banned by the French government for its political content and not released until after the Algerian war ...”

“... Julian Bell informed his mother Vanessa that the war in which he was serving as an ambulance man was ‘perpetually entertaining and very satisfactory’, one of the chief pleasures being ‘getting back into male society’. John Cornford fought in Spain as a zealous young Communist, but his letters to Margot Heinemann reflect the same ...”

“... it is a daunting bibliography, and no obvious starting-point presents itself, other than the man himself. In Two Sisters, his ‘novel as memoir, memoir as novel’, the narrator, V., an idealised Vidal, says: ‘In a sense, the only purpose of life is the creation of a self and what matters is the sum total of all one’s attempts.’ There have been ...”

“... Soyez mysterieuses,’ Paul Gauguin had carved into the lintel of his last residence in the South Seas, the ‘House of Pleasure’, or ‘House of Orgasm’, as some would translate Maison du Jouir. ‘I am not a painter who copies nature – today less than before. With me everything happens in my crazy imagination ...”

“... on as a live-in secretary’, during a brief experiment with tantouserie, and Louis de Gonzague Frick, ‘the parody of a fin-de-siècle aesthete’, not to mention the host of dealers and collectors, like Alfred Flechtheim of Düsseldorf, an intrepid Picassophile, who exhibited ‘a preference for policemen ...”

“... fenced with barbed-wire, all its trams, even all its sports facilities, had then belonged to the De Beers Consolidated Mines, which had belonged to him; sometimes the same seemed to be true of its heat, its sand, its tin-roofed houses. The convent school, three blocks away from my house, had been the hotel in which he had lived while Kimberley was ...”