“... more deeply. As Mailer wrote (it is one of the texts quoted near the close of Alvarez’s Savage God), ‘the private terror of the liberal spirit is invariably suicide, not murder.’ In the light of the assaults on Lennon and Reagan, it might be truer, today, to say that murder is the form in which America’s suicidal impulse has begun to express ...”

“... mingling’. ‘Alida was hungry for realism. Most of her favourite books were non-fiction, like Anne Frank’s diary . . . books where stuff happened because there was no other way for it to happen, however much the author might have wanted it to happen differently.’ That said, she also has a weakness for Agatha Christie and Miss Marple’s fussy talent ...”

“... delicately induce the hypnotic state that Bishop described as her artistic ideal in a letter to Anne Stevenson: ‘What one seems to want in art, in experiencing it, is the same thing that is necessary for its creation, a self-forgetful, perfectly useless concentration.’ A tiny poem, ‘The Thin Man’, in Justice’s second collection, Night Light ...”

“... cannot excuse the bathos, as we lurch into pages of panegyric to William of Orange and Queen Anne and a parade of Whig politicians. For a biographer, Defoe’s own sense of the importance of what he wrote must matter a good deal. During most of his career as a writer, he was preoccupied with politics. He was almost 60 when he published his first ...”

“... the enthusiasm of the headmaster. But there is every difference here between the author of The Savage God and the author of the recent sober and scholarly study of the Movement poets. Blake Morrison, and his co-editor Andrew Motion, are well aware that ‘in the face of manifesto-making a degree of scepticism is only proper’; and they are careful neither ...”

“... Alongside the monuments Bray presents and describes are some startling texts. On 12 February 1834, Anne Lister recorded in her diary her plans to solemnise her union with Ann Walker: ‘She is to give me a ring & I her one in token of our union.’ Their relationship ‘would be as good as a marriage’, Ann had said. ‘Yes,’ said ...”

“... drive to self-immolation. Charlotte’s Villette is full of such erotic perversities. Apart from Anne Brontë’s writings, there is nothing moderate or middle of the road about these extremist fictions. They do not fit easily with the mainstream English novel from Austen and Thackeray to George Eliot and Henry James. The Brontës are a long way from the ...”

“... to find a place for Flaubert in her own work. Something similar happens when she outsources some savage comedy from Ödön von Horváth for another piece. It’s as if she worries that a couple of twists from the peppermill of irony are needed to boost the piquancy of the book. Luckily she’s droll and companionable on the page, with no need to enlarge her ...”

“... has already been said. Photographs are details, and to be modern ‘is to live, entranced, by the savage autonomy of the detail’. Photography understood as art can ask us ‘to stare at banality and also to relish it, drawing on the very developed habits of irony that are affirmed by the surreal juxtapositions of photographs typical of sophisticated ...”

“... the other, black for Whitechapel or Spitalfields, conjuring a ‘dark continent’ whose ignorant, savage tribes, like those elsewhere in the British Empire, needed the clarifying light of Christian missionaries or exposure to scientific reason.The maps were imaginative artefacts as much as scientific documents. In the new folio they have been ...”

“... his nonsense about cannibals in Australia. In much the same class was his contemporary, A. Henry Savage Landor, grandson of the poet. As a boy he half-hanged himself, which, as Keay remarks, was excellent training for being towed by the throat behind Tibetan ponies. Worse things than that supposedly happened to him in the Himalayas, where he ‘took to heart ...”

“... Lancelot. The diffusion of personal names can indicate a saint’s waxing or waning popularity. St Anne, the Virgin’s mother, became popular only in the later Middle Ages, as did Mary Magdalene – hence the founding of Magdalen College, Oxford in 1458 and Magdalene College, Cambridge in 1542. We find very few medieval Josephs: the foster father of Jesus ...”

“... the 13th century, has exercised an incalculable influence on Christian ideas about sanctity; its savage accounts of martyrdoms conjure images in the mind’s eye more like the covers of slasher movies in video shops than anything pious, while its unabashed anti-semitism prefigures modern demons of another kind. The Golden Legend was approved literature for ...”

“... would have been much better placed to think about these matters had they been able to consult Anne Buck’s Dress in 18th-century England (1978), whose immense range of sound research makes it far more easy to draw out the cultural meanings of dress, on and off the stage. Nicoll’s capacity to deal with all the things he leaves out cannot be ...”

“... likely to produce revulsion in the reader. It’s hard to imagine that Enrigue, starting from that savage brushstroke, could manage to build up something close to a balanced portrait of Moctezuma, but he does. He also successfully handles a large cast of characters in a modestly proportioned book, and even throws in the hook of thriller intrigue for the ...”