“... double involves extensive whipping of Lumb’s bald head and the sacrifice of an enormous white bull. The scene combines the lineaments of a modern torture chamber – a windowless room, a concrete floor, unnamed men wielding whips ‘hard and heavy as a lump of wire cable’ and brandishing electrified clubs – with the arcane rituals of a primitive ...”

“... only a handful of stories. The ambitious new Penguin edition, translated by the veteran Arabist Malcolm Lyons, can claim to be the first ‘complete’ English version rendered from the original without recourse to Galland. But the inverted commas are needed, because there can never really be a definitive edition of this book. Nor, in some sense, can it ...”

“... to be the comedy of an environment and its many and variously motivated users.In his new book, Malcolm Turvey takes this particular bull by the horns, proposing that Tati’s films should be regarded as a form of ‘comedic modernism’. We are accustomed to thinking of the international movements of the postwar ...”

“... the Angry Brigade, the language of whose communiqués (identified by a stamp made from a John Bull printing set) led the Met Bomb Squad to Ian Purdie and Jake Prescott (the former a left-wing activist, previously convicted for throwing a petrol bomb at the Ulster Office during a demonstration; the latter a drug-user and small-time criminal who’d met ...”

“... publishing world. The last time we met, a week before his trip to Seattle, he was wearing a Malcolm X cap and carrying a well-worn copy of William Gaddis’s novel The Recognitions. On 8 July, after a breakfast with the Democratic presidential candidate and former basketball star Bill Bradley, Joe went to Mount Rainier to do some birdwatching. He never ...”

“... with the Mafia. The Krays were a craze of the Sixties, adulated in the American style, like Malcolm X or Al Capone, Huey Long or Joe Bananas. They were like rock stars, they were in with the press, said to be in with the law: even today, while they lie in jail, the Daily Telegraph prints interviews with them, as if they were as respectable as the Shah ...”

“... to chisel free of its moorings. Then got the hell out. Home. Past the squatted shell of the Black Bull with its ‘No Evictions’ banner, through the Blank Generation extras waiting for nothing in the boarded-up shopping precinct, ducking into Muggers’ Alley alongside the decommissioned post office. To my Mid-Victorian terrace, an enclave of class ...”

“... and limb to limb as surely as a panning camera; Michelangelo’s vision of flesh-made-spirit in bull-thick bodies which just fall short of muscle-bound caricature. Van Dyck did not have Rubens’s intellectual scope but he was a wonderful pupil, and he tempered what he learned in Rubens’s studio with what he saw in the work of other painters – Titian in ...”

“... genius lay in targeting the richest and most prestigious corporations in the 11th-century bull-market, then squeezing them for all they were worth and more. They knew how to use the organisations they captured: not their least typical creation was what could be thought of as the West’s first civil service college, the cathedral chapter and school ...”

“... July 1929, Claud was dispatched to support the Times man in New York and report on the ‘great bull market’, the apparently unstoppable uprush of share values. On 24 October, the boom broke, shares fell vertically and the cataclysm that would drive the world into the Depression began its horrible course. ‘Remember,’ Louis Hinrichs, the Times ...”

“... fists aloft, with thumbs erect, to cries of ‘dume, dume’ from the crowd. ‘Dume’ means ‘bull’ and is the Luo cry of solidarity. The scene was set, pundits agreed, for a serious confrontation between the Kikuyu and Luo factions. But where and when would it occur? The answer was not long in coming. Before the last mourners had left Rusinga ...”

“... thorough, and sometimes no less ruthless, for being ‘de facto’ rather than ‘de jure’. As Malcolm X remarked, ‘the Mason-Dixon line begins at the Canadian border.’In 1964 even Nina Simone, no racial optimist, could sing ‘Old Jim Crow, don’t you know, it’s all over now!’ But in the early 1990s, many blacks started to wonder if they were ...”

“... presidency doing big things, unencumbered by the caution and exhaustion that had crept in.’ As Malcolm Gladwell has pointed out, basketball is the team sport which most depends on the outstanding individual, someone whose outsize talent can carry the weaker players. When LeBron James moves from city to city, the teams he plays for rise and fall with ...”

“... only that, though he didn’t know Heron by name, he had seen him around Wear Garth with his pit bull terrier.‘In 1993, a trial took place at the Crown Court in Leeds. The man accused of the murder of Nikki Allan was George Heron. The jury found him not guilty. They were right to do so.’ These words began the third paragraph of Wright’s opening ...”