“... at the bottom of the river while the scene unfolding on the bank slowly enters the wood and stone of the bridge above her and passes into her body: ‘Her face, pressed sideways to the piling, absorbs it all.’ In the first story in Specimen Days, ‘In the Machine’, set at the height of New York’s industrial revolution, a young boy called Lucas ...”

“... of his most famous photographs: the cyclist caught gliding down a cobbled hill at the base of some stone steps in Hyères, and the man jumping over a puddle behind the Gare Saint-Lazare, captured in mid-air and reflected perfectly in the water, the pitched roof of the station behind him shrouded in mist. Madrid, 1933 Behind the Gare Saint-Lazare, Paris, 1932 ...”

“... popularity with her accession, it could take nothing for granted. It was less than a decade since Robert Peel had predicted that it would not last another five years, and while the violent civil disorder of the early 1830s had abated, there was still considerable ambivalence towards an institution whose incumbents in the two previous reigns had done much to ...”

“... owned a van’. The couple married in 1937 when Beth fell pregnant; the child, a boy called Robert, died. Two years later, they had Cora and after the war, opened a newsagent-tobacconist-cornershop called the Cabinette. Twenty years later, Janice is a toddler and Eddie is increasingly flailing, violent, drunk. Shortly before Beth and Janice leave for ...”

“... there is a colour, a quiet but tireless goodness that things at rest, like a brick wall or a small stone, seem to affirm. He goes on to set out his ambition ‘to transcribe middleness with all its grits, bumps and anonymities, in its fullness of satisfaction and mystery’. To see what this might mean, let’s take one of James Wood’s examples, a sentence ...”

“... books, including (chosen because I read them too): The Wind in the Willows, The Sword in the Stone, Through the Looking-Glass, Burglar Bill, Alfie Gets in First, Where the Wild Things Are. Piaget’s theories of childhood development are introduced, as are some of the problems with them. We learn that ‘by the time of the Domesday Book in 1086 it would ...”

“... to the stylist as ‘interpreter between the industry and the consumer’. ‘The foundation stone of the previous intellectual structure of Design Theory has crumbled,’ Banham wrote in 1961. ‘There is no longer universal acceptance of Architecture as the universal analogy of design.’ In this scheme of things the book didn’t kill ...”

“... that they’d . . . construct some decent facsimile of life below in the grass, brick and grey stone, perceive the human grain making up the fabric of the view. Otherwise what could the eye see as it looked down on a strange land from so high, except history instead of yesterday, prophecy instead of tomorrow, and a today that was either a view, or a ...”

“... arms’. Repeatedly, he is described as ‘a perfect statue’; ‘satin smooth, cool as stone’; his flesh so cold and hard and ‘perfected’ – like the dead body in Sylvia Plath’s final poem, ‘Edge’ – that Bella has to wrap herself in an ‘old afghan’ before they can share the briefest snuggle. So here we have him, the perfect ...”

“... caused by Bremba’s ‘pet tiger’; her skin breaks out in weals at a touch. She loses two stone in weight. More voices take over, one of a little girl crying for her mummy; Alma’s body swells up in a fake pregnancy. She has erotic nightmares in which she is vampirised (puncture marks appear on her arms). Utterly dissociated from her body, she knows ...”

“... I have warned you against becoming’:Wash the white clothes on Monday and put them on the stone heap; wash the colour clothes on Tuesday and put them on the clothesline to dry; don’t walk barehead in the hot sun; cook pumpkin fritters in very hot sweet oil; soak your little cloths right after you take them off … This is how you sweep a yard; this ...”

“... psychology women don’t want to get involved in politics.’ He saw Farage as ‘a stepping stone’. He was sympathetic to the splinter parties on Reform’s right: Lowe’s Restore Britain, which advocates ‘remigration’, a sanitised word for mass expulsions, and Ben Habib’s Advance UK, which has been endorsed by Elon Musk. What about the ...”

“... spears at the British. Individual British deaths were taken very seriously. After Lieutenant Robert Grenfell was hacked to death during the cavalry charge at Omdurman, his brother’s angry account of it spurred the men inspecting the wasted battlefield to ‘polish off the wounded and dangerous Dervishes with their bayonets in a very determined ...”

“... to the margins’. There, pockets of Whig resistance no doubt remain – readers of Lawrence Stone’s correspondence with Russell in the TLS not so long ago might be surprised to learn the field had become so pacific. Yet even Stone has conceded the second part of the victory the revisionists claim. For he, too, has ...”

“... proposition that the body was nothing more than a complex system of measurable physical processes. Robert Koch’s Institute in Berlin was the epicentre for the bacteriological revolution – one pathogen, one disease and, we hope, one vaccine, one cure – which still dominates medical thinking. And so on. By the end of the 19th century the institutional ...”