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“... of ‘the people’ (Hafez al Asad in Syria, Saddam Hussein in Iraq, who during the Gulf War discovered that he, too, was descended from the Prophet); or to some mix of these. Since attributes of this kind have to exist in the eyes of the beholders, we need to understand what it is they believe they behold and why they might do so. In what are the ...”

“... is shown posing for the camera as a ‘dying warrior’). But he came from the middle class and was much too large and ungainly to cut the necessary figure in Montesquiou’s crowd. He was always getting into fistfights, in part because of his taste for rough trade, but also because he was driven by resentment: with him, you wonder which came ...”

“... that is, an app called DingTalk was introduced. Students are meant to sign in and join their class for online lessons; teachers use the app to set homework. Somehow the little brats worked out that if enough users gave the app a one-star review it would get booted off the App Store. Tens of thousands of reviews flooded in, and DingTalk’s rating ...”

“... eye. This is a quality societies have always prized: how else can soldiers be persuaded to go to war? To avoid the opprobrium that would result from killing their opponent, some duellists would point their pistols in the air. Achieving ‘a definite result’, the Marquis of Dorchester observed in 1660, was hardly important beside the aim of demonstrating ...”

“... theory. He had got to know André Breton when they were both in New York during the Second World War, and developed close friendships with Max Ernst, André Masson and others in Surrealist circles.) The chapter ends with a long account of formal game-playing in various indigenous American societies. There are many such complex detours in Wild Thought, and ...”

“... In ‘The Indian Uprising’, a story Barthelme described as a ‘response’ to the Vietnam War, a wise woman observes that ‘young people … run to more and more unpleasant combinations as they sense the nature of our society.’ The narrator visits her for advice after trying to ‘defend the city’ from invaders by constructing a barricade out of ...”

“... one of its boldest acts when she had herself arrested disguised as ‘Jane Warton’, a working-class woman, to expose the government’s double standards. Earlier accounts of Constance’s life have claimed that she was interested in prison reform long before she became a suffragette, but Jenkins has found little evidence of that, or of any great interest ...”

“... a travesty of the national anthem performed on a Stratocaster, speaks to violence at home and war abroad. Johnson’s bombing campaign in North Vietnam, which had wound up in November the previous year, was still fresh in people’s minds, and it transpired later that Hendrix had closed out the festival six months – to the day – after Nixon began ...”

“... enough suggests, to get away from his father and Cartesian family values. The Thirty Years War had just begun, and it was an odd time for someone who so vigorously expressed his love of repose to become a soldier. But if it was a killing time, Descartes was mainly just killing time, and, while he was a notable fencer, there is no certain evidence that ...”

“... for High Keeping with a Jew Merchant.’ When Wellington left Wilson to go off to the Peninsular War, his campaign orders included the instruction that ‘there shall be six women to every hundred men and these shall be drawn by lot before embarkation . . . The women shall be on half rations and no wine however salt the meat.’ In a society where any kind ...”

“... squib he had published in that year.) The windfall elevates the two of them into the rentier class, a vital qualification for those about to engage on a sustained demonstration of their stupidity. Having moved to their own place in the country, the ex-copyists are free to pursue their hitherto stifled ambitions, and to make it apparent, alas, that once a ...”

“... and infanticide. Cressy is not writing history from below, however. He refers to his lower-class female culprits by their first names, while his clergymen retain the respectability of their surnames. And he confuses ‘thick description’ with what he calls ‘gruesome detail’, as in the story of Lydia Downes who was a party to infanticide in ...”

“... were modelled on the comedian Jerry Lewis’s American telethon. Dystrophies belong to the class of so-called ‘orphan diseases’, conditions too rare to attract the profit-oriented attentions of the big pharmaceutical companies. The AFM decided that the best way of alleviating children’s suffering was by way of basic scientific research ...”

“... between cormorants and herons – but it has hawkish tendencies. Sailors called it ‘the man-o’-war bird’. It’s a pirate – a kleptoparasite to scientists – known for snapping up the ill-guarded treasure of others. It can catch its own food if required and will take flying fish, but its feathers are poorly waterproofed so it avoids the waves if it ...”

“... Morse, an angelic virgin from a bourgeois family which looks down on him because of his working-class background. Fame comes, but with a postscript: his friend Russ Brissenden, who writes with an ease that makes Martin envious, shoots himself in the head – writing, it turns out, wasn’t enough. Brissenden was based on the Bay Area poet George Sterling, a ...”