“... the bin, half that time in a closed ward: ‘Art has led me to the psychiatric department of the North London Royal.’ Lithium has tamed him, but he cannot take care of himself. He lives in Camden in squalor. Fenchurch is brought ‘home’ to Yorkshire by a daughter of his first marriage. ‘Home’ is another recurrent element in Storey’s work, and the ...”

“... as he mockingly put it. He was one year old when his naval officer father was killed in the North Sea in October 1916, a death which meant that from then on the boy and his mother would be hard up. His mother’s was much the grander of the two families, her father having risen to be a colonial governor in French West Africa. On that side there was ...”

“... half of the 20th century, such as Benavente, Unamuno or Alberti, remain unknown, as playwrights, north of the Pyrenees; and no Spanish dramatist since the Civil War has produced anything even remotely comparable to El público (‘The Audience’ or ‘The Public’), Once Five Years Pass, Don Perlimplín, Doña Rosita the Spinster, Blood Wedding, Yerma or ...”

“... considers the Americas as a connected whole, and is unusual in pursuing the relationships between North and Central America without anti-colonialist animus or righteousness. The sense of geography is the best thing about the book, the ‘bilocation’ of María’s adolescent religious fantasy becoming the novel’s narrative method. María emigrates to the ...”

“... had starved to death in every village.’ The economist Hu Angang spent seven years on the north-east border with Siberia, and as a driller in a prospecting team in northern China. He often travelled to remote villages in mountainous areas: Witnessing their absolute poverty, I became acutely conscious of the degree of China’s backwardness, and was ...”

“... bursaries, but his advisers also wanted evidence of skill. One of them, however, suggested he see John Reed. Reed was a solicitor, interested in Modernism. He lived with his wife Sunday in a house called Heide, in Heidelberg, a semi-rural community outside Melbourne – it had given its name to the Heidelberg School of Australian painters in the late 19th ...”

“... But this was no ordinary liquidation. With estates in Campania, Sicily, France, Spain, Britain and North Africa, their teenage marriage had joined two of the wealthiest dynasties in the western Mediterranean. The early deaths of two children only strengthened their resolve to become chaste. Outright rejection of family life was followed by the deliberate ...”

“... Soho. Closer inspection reveals a Metro sign across the street, surely the clincher. But no: John Davenport, writing in Lilliput 17 years later, claimed he knew the joint concerned. ‘If you know Hastings really well you may recognise it.’ Hastings or wherever (‘Burra-Burra Land’ Davenport called it), Burra created here one of his finest greed ...”

“... leprechauns spin on their pointed hats, he inserts the scholarly reservation: ‘but only in the north-eastern counties’. Is Yeats here sending up the reader, the folklorists, or mocking his own relentlessly mythopoeic mind? Or is he sending up nobody at all? A poet who literally lives in one of his own symbols, a half-ruined tower in County Galway, is ...”

“... 1773, after a 13-month voyage from Britain, the sloops Resolution and Adventure arrived on the north coast of Tahiti. For some on board, including their captain, James Cook, this was a return visit to the Pacific haven they called ‘King George’s Island’. The British were there, among other reasons, to check the performance of a small jewelled ...”

“... globally – a big if – we will before long be able to trade carbon anywhere in the world. As John Lanchester noted in the last issue of the LRB, the science of global warming is not straightforward. The basic physics has been clear since the 19th century. What’s been harder to understand in detail are matters such as the many feedback loops by which a ...”

“... the manuscript was copied in a dialect of Middle English specific to the South-East Cheshire and North-East Staffordshire border. (The poet’s dialect is thought to be from a little further south.) This North-West Midlands version of Middle English is a different lexical cocktail to Chaucer’s London English. Chaucer’s ...”

“... complexity of the mathematics involved in derivatives can’t be exaggerated. This was the reason John Meriwether, a famous bond trader, employed Myron Scholes – of the Scholes-Black equation – and the man with whom Scholes shared the 1997 Nobel Prize in Economics, Robert Merton, to be directors and co-founders of his new hedge fund Long-Term Capital ...”

“... and excitement of research than Julia Blackburn’s account of her attempt to find out about John Craske. Detail from Craske’s ‘The Evacuation of Dunkirk’ She first hears about him from her friend Emily, who told her: ‘He was a fisherman who became a painter and embroiderer … I think he’s much better than Alfred Wallis down in ...”

“... to be the remains of James Hanratty had been packed into a coffin at Bedford prison and brought to North London. Capital punishment had been abolished the previous year. The Home Secretary, Roy Jenkins, had decreed that convicted murderers, whose bodies had by ancient barbarian law been consigned to quicklime in the prison yard, could be buried in consecrated ...”