“... 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 ...”

“... the 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... this if only this one, is ours.Don’t Call Us Dead brought Smith, who was born in St Paul, Minnesota, mainstream success. But it put them (Smith uses the non-gendered pronoun) in the difficult position of having profited from a book explicitly about Black suffering. ‘These poems are not the poems any poet wished to have so widely ...”

“... harbingers of a slide to nothingness, not marks of a transcendence to come. To grow old, as Simone de Beauvoir said, ‘is to define oneself’ and being defined, even self-defined, is privative as well as positive. The ascent to seniority prunes possibility: the old are what they are and, to a lesser extent, what they have been, though past achievements ...”

“... and uncounted lions and leopards’. Cicero protested: ‘What pleasure can a cultivated man find seeing a noble beast run through with a hunting spear?’ But his, like Plutarch’s after him, was a lone voice. A huge industry of hunters and traders lay behind the Roman excesses, and took its toll: lions effectively disappeared from North ...”

“... the papacy threatened to escalate into armed conflict. After his election as pope in May 1605, Paul V sought to overturn restrictions on church-building and the unlicensed transfer of properties to the Church, while also seeking to deny the republic’s right to try clergy indicted on criminal charges in secular courts. The Venetians resisted, resulting in ...”

“... readings in the suburbs of Algiers. He wasn’t a good communist: he’d been disabused by Retour de l’URSS, Gide’s unsparing account of socialism in one country, and didn’t share the party’s hostility to the first stirrings of nationalism in Algeria. He’d begun work on a novel and a set of essays when he was denounced as a Trotskyist and expelled ...”

“... in 1597, the legend of Orpheus is made the occasion for extensive satire on women; Bacon’s De Sapienta Veterum of 1609 explains ‘it is wisely added in the story that Orpheus was averse from women and from marriage; for the sweets of marriage ... commonly draw men away from performing great and lofty services ...’; in Fletcher’s play of ...”

“... from Savile Row. Yet Savile Row dominated male fashion for more than a century, just as the rue de la Paix has dominated female fashion. Tailors have never been given the credit that has gone to couturiers. They have stayed in the shadows, sitting cross-legged or wielding their tape-measures in traditional obscurity. The story of modern male fashion – and ...”

“... administered a spanking. (For all I know, this is one of the many triggers that may have set Paul Johnson off.)Tariq Ali was the moving spirit of that rally and this book – which includes the spanking picture – brings it all back with exquisite vividness. It’s hard to recall what a hate-figure he was in those days. I had a friend, a moustachioed ...”