“... Thorpe’s sister, eventually committed suicide; his paternal grandfather was an archdeacon. In May 1968, Thorpe married Caroline Allpass, who died in a car crash 11 days after the 1970 general election. His second wife, Marion Stein, was a refugee from prewar Vienna who had been married to the earl of Harewood, and remained with Thorpe until her death ...”

“... In​ New York in the 1960s, your first sight of gay pornography may well have been in public, looking in a sex shop window. If you were a gay kid, but closeted you would have reacted with pleasure, certainly, maybe even bliss – what Roland Barthes called jouissance. But there would also have been an inexplicable, almost sickening lust, and the fear of being seen looking ...”

“... other, on the face of it more surprising, non-religious sources of jihadi violence. The jihadists may have severely disrupted the international system of nation states, but they have had support in doing so from ‘enemy’ governments. The story of the United States and Saudi Arabia helping Osama bin Laden fight the Soviets in Afghanistan is now ...”

“... and other fine thinges: as platters, dishes, glasses, cups, and such like thinges, wherewith you may furnish a table: and when you have done, you may eat them up.’ Trying to follow these recipes in 2016 isn’t easy, in part because of the delphic tone of many of the instructions (‘Take gum Dragant, as much as you ...”

“... the English are more negative than seems justified by the people and situations he describes, and may have been added or amplified after the disappointing outcome of his mission. He frequently echoes the remark that Napoleon is reputed to have made about the English being a nation of shopkeepers, a characteristic that must have been especially annoying to ...”

“... He travelled to St Croix and found a hut behind the Schimmelmanns’ house where the house slaves may have lived. He wonders if Hans Jonathan was conceived here, or in the fields of sugarcane, and if he was the result of rape. Palsson’s attention to place is part of his larger anthropological project of recalling the world in which Hans Jonathan lived, and ...”

“... protected from discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation or gender identity. (Liberals may find Gorsuch’s approach to law less appealing when the court is faced with affirmative action cases.) But no one doubts that Gorsuch is on the right wing of the Republican Party, and there are no signs of his moving to the left. A court governed by ...”

“... in gear’. A character dies by autoerotic asphyxiation, aka ‘the old chokey-strokey’. You may find it silly, but, applied to the work’s more gruesome content – that’s what we’re here for, after all – this childlike language can be remarkably effective. It’s a rare day that goes by when I don’t think of King’s greatest, most ...”

“... as a ‘faux pas’, and ‘An Epistle from Mrs Bustle to Mrs Pad’, printed in the Times in May 1793, ends with the lines: ‘A projection much better, behind than before,/Because it make virgins now look like a ——.’ Rauser wants us to see this strange fad as part of the broader drive to transform women into living statues. Sir Gilbert ...”

“... all life and subvert all freedoms’, and even thinking or reading about them for too long may induce ‘nausea, clinical nausea’. So Martin Amis in ‘Thinkability’, the introduction to his collection of stories Einstein’s Monsters. The monsters are the weapons – but also ourselves, who are ‘not fully human, not for now’. Given such a ...”

“... other hand, it has many unfamiliar photographs (not counting stills), and any photograph of Garbo may seem worth having. Besides, its preposterousness evokes – far better than a cleverer book like, say, What makes Sammy run – the dream landscape that stretched all the way from Hollywood to UFA in Berlin and Svensk Filmindustri in Stockholm. So much for ...”

“... date nowadays ... but I don’t believe people care a damn, so long as the story is funny.’ He may be ‘archaic’, assuming a state of affairs as out of date as Three Men in a Boat: but ‘I believe that people will jump at something that takes them away from modern conditions.’ ‘I read a book about Dickens the other day which pointed out that D was ...”

“... clubs and construct mad legends about the golden years when they were in charge. Such fairy-tales may be comforting to those who weave them. But the rest of us should not believe them. Oddly enough, the Conservative Party is by no means unique in possessing a highly misleading mythology about its past. The Liberal Party, as was, had its share of ...”

“... gets her hair and nails done at Madame Cleo’s. She does not see what the women of Hasnapur, who may be old at 22, know: that there are no insides and no outsides. These Americans come from a place where ‘the language you speak is what you are.’ Darrel, the pig-farmer who has named his dog Shadow, asks Jane to come up with a pretty name for the golf club ...”

“... his Disraeli disconcerting reading for the more impressionable members of Blake’s own party. He may have been expected to act as the keeper of the bones of the saint. Instead, he revealed where the bodies were buried. Iconoclasm of this sort was unanswerable. It was worse than de-Stalinisation; Humpty Dumpty himself was better capable of being stuck ...”