“... it in its true archaic shape and colour, not disguising its brutality’. Other reviewers took the opposite view, most vehement among them Ciaran Carson in The Honest Ulsterman. ‘It is as if he is saying, suffering like this is natural; these things have always happened; they happened then, they happen now, and that is sufficient ground for ...”

“... Thomson’s narrator is Schwob/Cahun’s life partner, Suzanne Malherbe, born in 1892, who also took a name with a masculine implication, Marcel Moore. ‘Life partner’ seems a defensible term despite the element of euphemism, since it acknowledges an element of the familial in what was presumably a sexual relationship. The two knew each other in ...”

“... submit their coursework essays online as Word documents or PDFs. A few years ago, my department took the decision to run them automatically through the plagiarism-checking software Turnitin, which generates a percentage ‘score’ gauging an essay’s similarity to other digitally available documents, including journal articles, websites and all the other ...”

“... come and gone like shadows – Jim, the soccer star, had vanished, And Joe, the pensive one, and John, of calculus the gloomy hero … She flirted and procrastinated, toyed superficially with love, but in her heart awaited more. 16 Inevitably comes the day; He’s leaving, the ethereal friend: the bill is paid, exams are done with, the tennis racket in its ...”

“... sampler of the high life. In both roles he fitted right in: he was, in his own words, John Bunyan’s ‘Mr Facing-both-ways’. He is intensely, almost insanely sociable. He discovered at an early age that being able to perform as a public speaker meant that ‘you need never dine or sleep alone.’ Early on, he mainly chose to sleep with boys ...”

“... up the steeply banked terraces. But noble as the site appears, it is not entirely benign. The poet John Lucas, in 92 Acharnon Street, reminds us that the old Olympic stadium is where ‘the Colonels assembled schoolchildren for parades so that they might learn to salute the Greek flag.’ Across a never relenting stream of traffic, motorbikes cascading from ...”

“... of Linear Elamite. Afterwards, the keeper of the Middle East department at the British Museum, John Curtis, mentioned that he knew the Mahboubian family and could make an introduction. It took four years of cajoling but eventually the family agreed to withdraw the silver vessels from a safe deposit box for Desset to ...”

“... came during the Vietnam War (about which I was to write a book in 1982), when certain people took the position that they were against both Saigon and Hanoi. What then were they for? The answer given in a piece written jointly by Irving Howe and the political theorist Michael Walzer, the editors of Dissent, after the war was over was that they had ...”

“... collection links up with the superficially very different, and better, translation (published by John Fuller’s Sycamore Press) which the even younger Larkin, painstakingly following Eliot and other Modernists, took from Baudelaire’s ‘Femmes Damnées’ – the Larkin poem a fascinatingly talented if odd attempt to ...”

“... often achieve greatness at an early age, and without having written hundreds of pages. It took Cavaillès fewer than a hundred pages to launch the French ‘philosophy of the concept’, composed in a prison camp in a few months in 1942. And Wittgenstein wrote the 80-page Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, his revolutionary critique of Russell and ...”

“... front of Le Champ de choux, and I have no doubt he thought the risk worth running. This is what it took to put painting in touch.‘Putting painting in touch’. This leads to the difficult – metaphysical – phrase that one witness has Cézanne producing later in life: ‘Je vois, par taches.’ ‘I see in touches – patches – dabs – stains.’ Or I ...”

“... chair while the director and actors were away from the set, made crude comments about her body and took Polaroids of her. ‘I wanted to rip the tape off and run screaming out of Silvercup Studios,’ she said. ‘Instead, I just lay there knowing I had a job for another day and health insurance through the Screen Actors Guild.’ Years after the original ...”

“... model galleon sat on a table. Photos of him meeting foreign dignitaries were framed on the wall: John McCain, Vladimir Putin, Jens Stoltenberg.Đukanović stared at me intently during our conversation; a fat watch slid up and down his left wrist as he spoke. ‘Serbia always thought of us as the annoying little rock in their shoe,’ he said, explaining that ...”

“... practised. The story might have ended there. Instead, 38 state legislatures provided what they took to be a rationale for executing some and not other criminals. Finally, in 1976, a case went up to the Supreme Court – from Georgia – testing whether states had, in principle, succeeded in providing such a rationale. Specifically, the question in the case ...”

“... A sumptuously filthy blonde, and a brunette we called “The Princess” on whose humanity I took off as if flying a plane or riding a horse.’ He also wrote about his love for a prostitute called Luz: ‘I tell you, I really loved that Luz: she was so playful with me and behaved with such ingenuous indecency. She was like a cathedral and also like a ...”