“... colonies is rapidly becoming the condition of all of subaltern humanity. Mbembe’s Politiques de l’inimitié (2016), published in English translation three years later as Necropolitics, describes a world ravaged by ‘increasing inequality, militarisation, enmity and terror as well as by a resurgence of racist, fascist and nationalist forces’. The ...”

“... In 1954, I was a pupil at Les Dames de Marie, a French-speaking convent school in an expansive and pastoral suburb of Brussels. Every morning, as we crocodile-filed into our classrooms, we sang patriotic hymns. One of these, the ‘Marche Lorraine’, has a rousing chorus; in rapid ascending arpeggios as in a trumpet voluntary, we blasted out a paean to ‘the young shepherdess in clogs and woollen skirt’ who took up arms and walked out fearlessly to confront her king and restore him to his throne ...”

“... and self-dramatising misery breaks through – ‘The image he projected of an isolated, depressed man is almost comically contradicted by his diary.’ She writes less persuasively about the poetry, though it has to be said that Thomas’s poetry is unusually difficult to write about, partly because he writes in such ordinary language, with unusual tact and ...”

“... his famous wooziness about names – he has been known to refer to Liam Brady as ‘Ian’, to Paul McGrath as ‘John’, and during the World Cup described Egypt’s best players as ‘the boy with the beard, the dark lad who played in midfield, the sweeper, the goalkeeper, the little dark lad who played in midfield and the very coloured ...”

“... painted, cooked, travelled and made love in something like contentment. She was at the Slade with Paul Nash (who gave her his braces, taking them off on top of a bus), and through him or through Nevinson she might have become an illustrator, as they were, for the Poetry Bookshop. She could have learned etching from Sickert, always generous to beginners, or ...”

“... Kamen’s point of departure is Braudel’s description of the Empire of Philip II as ‘un total de faiblesse’ – is also widely accepted. True, few recent historians of Spain have seen things this way, but neither are they as resolutely nationalistic as Kamen makes out. Most of the works he cites in support of his belief that Spanish historiography is ...”

“... essays become the headnotes to Franzen’s angst. Interspersed are glosses by the American scholar Paul Reitter, who has the thankless job of historically contextualising Kraus’s grievances, and the German-Austrian writer Daniel Kehlmann, whose interpretations can be divided into the four categories that Freud apportioned for jokes: the obscene, the ...”

“... He reproduces a deliciously modish Bond Street tailor’s advertisement depicting ‘The Man of Today’: an infantry officer in superbly-cut uniform, stationed between the pile of his discarded top hat, white waistcoat and silver-topped cane and a mighty shell-burst labelled ‘WAR’. Again, one of the mushroom-growths of the war was ...”

“... of what he finds, though he struggles to keep his cool when unpicking the arcana of the Prieuré de Sion, which proposes that the Holy Grail is Mary Magdalene’s womb, and that her child with Jesus connects the kings of France to the Royal House of David.Mary Magdalene appears by name in the gospels as a woman possessed by seven devils, which are driven out ...”

“... Secretary of State for Northern Ireland terms ‘the Irish fever, the worst variety known to man’. As a critic, Levi is pure waffle, a recycled Maurice Bowra. I look forward to his next lecture. Levi’s poetry may not be the worst variety known to man, if only because it is easy to avoid being infected by it. In one ...”

“... Kingsley Amis called Dylan Thomas’s life, the life told by Thomas’s first thorough biographer Paul Ferris, ‘a hilarious, shocking, sad story’. Thomas was very important to the Amis-Larkin club partly because he seemed determined not to be seen to be taking anything, including himself, too seriously. In 1941, Larkin refers to Thomas coming to the English Club at Oxford: ‘Hell of a fine man: little, snubby, hopelessly pissed bloke who made hundreds of cracks and read parodies of everybody in appropriate voices ...”

“... a philosopher, the other a certified madman. The philosopher is Wittgenstein. The other is Daniel Paul Schreber, an appellate judge in late 19th-century Dresden whose detailed accounts of his experience of paranoid schizophrenia became the focus of Freud’s only major study of a psychotic illness, and were extensively explored by Bleuler and ...”

“... act to restore her text to its original form,’ he told the New Yorker. ‘It was rejected by a man, who didn’t really appreciate it in the first place.’ Not even Little Women has been overwhelmed with masculine approbation. To be sure, Amory Blaine boasts in This Side of Paradise of having read it twice, but on the whole there can be no other book so ...”

“... museums and hospital teaching departments are richly stocked with such specimens: a whole black man in a glass box in Chicago; quintuplet foetuses floating upwards, open-mouthed, like Donatello choristers, on a shelf in the Hunterian. Zarina Bhimji, another artist who, like Chadwick, expresses her challenge to common, unexamined responses through ...”

“... and the various peoples who came to them. He heard about the most famous of these visitors, a man from the north-western extremity of the world: ‘Li Madou was sent by the rulers of Macau to spy on the imperial court, which has caused recent consideration being given to clearing Macau out. There is a temple in Macau, in which Li Madou was once a ...”