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“... of his chest, only inches from his gaping mouth.’ The befouled young Oxonian, we discover on page 262, is actually the hero, Leon Forelock (of Cambridge). Why the deception? Forelock rounds on the reader with a bitter question by way of reply: ‘Would you have been able to show the proper intellectual regard for the spiritual history of a man, who, on ...”

“... at the history of oral versus silent prayer and the consequences of the privacy the silently-read page offers – one was that, in the late Middle Ages and Early Modern period, margins could show erotic scenes ‘unimaginable in public art or publicly displayed liturgical texts’. Alain Bourea traces the various uses of hagiography. The book of a saint’s ...”

“... The concept of the state of exception (which is discussed more fully in Malcolm Bull’s review on page 3) was first put forward in the 1920s by the political and legal scholar Carl Schmitt. Having written on dictatorship, Thomas Hobbes, and political Romanticism, Schmitt turned his attention to the newly established liberal democracy of the Weimar ...”

“... receive lit supp free but outpoint Richmond many more popular books must be dealt with also.’ (Bruce Richmond had been the editor of the Lit Supp since shortly after its launch in 1902.) An announcement of the merger was set in type, to appear in the next, and final, issue of the Lit Supp, but the increasingly erratic Northcliffe changed his mind at the ...”

“... In the window of the bargain shop there was a photocopy of the front page of the Sun showing a Belfast boy hugging a British soldier. Speech bubbles had been added to it, so that the boy was saying: ‘Why are you going home, Daddy?’ ‘Because the Provies have surrendered,’ the squaddy replies. A few of the Unionists I spoke to sounded this note of triumph at the IRA ceasefire but not many ...”

“... scholarly flotsam. It was a review of a book called Music and Poetry of the English Renaissance by Bruce Pattison: a learned, exact, even exacting, piece, full of abstruse detail, acknowledging the book’s achievement but, in the manner of young scholars everywhere, ticking it off for not drawing on the latest scholarship.Reflecting on this unexpected ...”

“... English edition of 1924 prints ‘its rosiness’, and so does Cambridge. Now, in his introduction Bruce Steele argues that Lawrence had nothing to do with the setting of the 1924 edition, and that the above reading is ‘more typical of editorial interference than of authorial change’. In other words, ‘his rosiness’ is almost surely what Lawrence ...”

“... figure missing from his researches: Trotsky. A year later he had gathered enough material for a 15-page cover feature but, in an act of obliteration that almost too neatly echoed its subject, the piece did not appear: an industrial dispute led to the pulping of nearly all the 1.5 million printed copies. He had turned the feature into a photographic ...”

“... to block out the facts in any way I could. Sometimes reading worked, but at others words on a page seemed inadequate. Screens were better. I watched The Killing and after each episode tried to unravel the intricacies of the plot with a friend. Then there was the cinema, a whole industry built on the promise of escape, both literal and metaphorical. When I ...”

“... the novel is splendidly titled Die sekstypiste. The therapist employing her is called Om – né Bruce – and Flavia is one of his clients. All Flavia’s money cannot buy her an orgasm. She’s in therapy to get to the bottom of the matter, but winds up bottoming, full stop. Greta becomes infatuated with Flavia as she types out her words, and when the two ...”

“... red-hot efforts to strike a deal with respect to futurity, have left them large and lively on the page. Boswell, a slovenly, scribbling, lovable Scot, and Johnson, a cantankerous old genius, a John Bull himself, now appear to us as creatures of one another’s making. Together they constitute a minor archipelago of literary selves.In the past it seemed ...”

“... established in the work of Octavia Butler and Samuel Delany among others, is glimpsed at here. Bruce Sterling’s description of William Gibson’s cyberpunk aesthetic as combining ‘low life and high tech’ applies in the grocery store scene, with the boorish security guard, the racialised suspicions of the white shoppers and the recording iPhone. The ...”

“... man without religion, and one who was ‘not a Muslim’. Then last December he published a three-page declaration: ‘Why I have embraced Islam’. Rushdie’s religious change of heart is, of course, a matter for his own conscience. As a public act, however, it is clearly meant to invite a response. Together with his decision not to permit further ...”

“... he took over as Arsenal manager. After the announcement in August 1996, the headline on the back page of the Daily Mirror ran: ‘Arsène Who?’ In his new autobiography, Wenger describes his first match as manager: ‘On 12 October 1996, I was no longer in the stands … We were playing away at Blackburn Rovers. Ian Wright scored twice. Victory! On the way ...”

“... than his aesthetician critic. The back jacket of the Intelligent Person’s Guide displays a full-page photograph of the author, in his tanned, coiffed and open-necked glory. He could model for Michelangelo. Since REM’s 1995 Monster tour, Stipe, once as elfinly beautiful as the young Truman Capote, has affected a shaven-headed, emaciated look. Scurrilous ...”