“... barrels, bottles and jars and loading them onto horses and carts and repurposed ploughs. People took whatever they could find. Francis Saveer, a mason, boarded the ship and managed to extract a piece of silk, eighteen rows of buttons, a jacket and a waistcoat. His servant took ‘two old jerkins and some old ...”

“... at the Central School of Arts and Crafts, where she studied illustration and textile design and took life drawing classes with Bernard Meninsky, who was known for his heavy black charcoal lines (Cooke preferred a 3H pencil). She went on to study sculpture at Goldsmiths – getting the highest mark in the country in her first exam – and pottery at ...”

“... to show that it does not follow from our knowledge of science. Further, it would not follow if we took an entirely Newtonian view of physics: Popper’s rejection of determinacy does not rest on the indeterminacy of quantum physics, which he is in any case unwilling to accept at face value – but that is an argument I do not want to get into. He argues that ...”

“... John Donne​ is a modern rediscovery. His reputation, high among his contemporaries, fell after their time, along with those of other 17th-century metaphysical poets who would wait equally long for rehabilitation. The late 17th century and the 18th, committed to orderliness of metre and feeling, disliked the ‘forced’ and ‘unnatural’ rhythms of his verse, his ‘false’ conceits, his unruly sensuality ...”

“... the stacked corpses and the few skeletal survivors in the Nazi death camps. After he died, Kaplan took some of these terrible photographs to school, to show them to other children, either to shock them or else because she missed her father: ‘I was trying to do what he would do, be like him.’ His is the approval, actual while he was still alive, fantasmal ...”

“... the connection is clear: ‘All my kirbigrips have vanished for a start this morning (yes, and WHO took them?), so what with searching for them and trying to find a slide, I hadn’t time to get my hymn-book before prayers – and of course the Badger had to choose today to inspect them, as she said she’s seen too many girls sharing recently. I suppose she ...”

“... offered in the end but the evils of their actions, had propagated but the baser instincts, which took root and flourished so effortlessly in this world they called, with a kind of black humour, new.’ The polity of Casquemada begins to collapse and violence, both random and politically-motivated, becomes common. Bissoondath’s delightful talent for the ...”

“... that it would be better not to spread the word about what life was like there?’   ‘Oh, I took that for granted!’ I also stood up. ‘Can I ask you one question?’   ‘Of course, ask away!’   ‘I fear that I may have difficulty getting hired. If they will not take me because of my past, can I turn to you?’   ‘Yes, yes, of ...”

“... Houellebecq, who was born in 1957, has either turned against, or never in the first place took to, the sexual liberalism in which his post-’68 generation grew up. In Whatever he conflates that liberalism in a cursory but effective way with the economic kind, to establish a harsh continuity between the ideology of laisser-faire which operates to ...”

“... the world that The Devil’s Alternative was composed in 44 days (some nine days more than it took him to write The Day of the Jackal, but lest one suspect a weakening of the authorial sinews, he reminds us that the earlier novel was 50,000 words shorter). Patterson asserts that ‘each of his books seldom takes longer than three months to write.’ And ...”

“... technical and aesthetic. Unlike most earlier book illustrators, he worked in wood, not copper. He took a vernacular skill and made it into an art, transforming the rude woodcut which had formerly been relegated to the local tavern wall into an elegantly executed image of sufficient sophistication to find its way into a gentleman’s library. Bewick perfected ...”

“... with the agility of Jack Tar. She easily outlived her son. But during his childhood her ill-health took precedence over his. While she was cossetted, the sickly Lewis (as he was then called) was left to the charge of ‘Cummy’, the nurse who slept in his room until he was ten and who drove him into night terrors that only she could calm. Her entertainments ...”

“... and News from Tartary, which is still better, succeeded so well because their author instinctively took to heart the advice of Dryden’s heroine. We cross Tartary on a daily basis, not so much pleased with seeing more as interested in what can be found to eat, what the weather’s like, how the camels come to reveal their personalities. This is the simplest ...”

“... pine trees and vices of the south’. (Not of the north, interestingly enough. Gothicism never took root in the Scottish background which Sir Walter had made his own, and where even barbarous old custom was healthy and bracing as well as picturesque.) Yet like the Magic Realists Angela Carter used the genre to make her views over-explicit, incidentally ...”

“... drunk at work. Yuri Andropov, the short-lived successor to the lax (and heavy-drinking) Brezhnev, took the KGB route: harassing of drunks. Gorbachev, in his first manifestation as an idealistic back-to-Leninism leader, copied Lenin’s tactic: he banned it. This evokes a passionate denunciation from Pokhlebkin, much of it wholly justified: In the course of ...”