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“... years; and why American audiences flocked to see it in some places (Boston, Cleveland, Houston, St Paul, Omaha) but not in others (Los Angeles, Chicago, New York). It also caused great division among critics. The film cost more than $300,000 to make, and lost more than half that amount. Although Browning’s career never recovered from it, his reputation has ...”

“... song dear to members of the Land League, partly perhaps because Charles Stewart Parnell’s estate lay in the Vale of Avoca, a stone’s throw from the confluence. The song eventually died out of the popular and school repertoires in Britain, though I am not sure when. Through the 1920s it was still being advertised by publishers, with great regularity, but ...”

“... that appears as an appendix to The Man Who Lived Underground and describes the experiences that lay behind the novel. The first – an encounter with the ‘strangely familiar’ – took place in Chicago, shortly before his grandmother’s death in 1934. Wright thought he had ‘swept my life clean … of the religious influences of my ...”

“... to have got food and water from their captors by singing his songs. Frogs suggests that his magic lay, at least partly, in emotionalism coupled with a new use of the fictional female voice. Bronze Age Greece could not escape Cretan sea-power, and classical Athenians could not escape Cretan myth and its effect on Greece. In Euripides, the boat carrying Phaedra ...”

“... the ‘new realism’, even if she questioned its basis in reality: its force, she suspected, lay in its appeal to an ‘ordinary’ Dutch person, steeped in native common sense, whose worries had been ignored for years by left-liberal elites. In the UK too, there were ‘new realist’ voices, led by Trevor Phillips, chair of the Equality and Human ...”

“... ambition that stamped the Frühromantik – the ambience of the Schlegels, Novalis, Jean Paul, Tieck, Fichte, Schleiermacher, with Hölderlin and Kleist off-stage – made it an explosive force far beyond the sentimental reach of the Lake Poets or the vaticinations of Hugo: a starburst that could never be repeated or forgotten, as its consequences ...”

“... The abyss of history​ is deep enough to hold us all,’ Paul Valéry wrote in 1919, as Europe lay in ruins. The words resonate today as the coronavirus blows the roof off the world, most brutally exposing Britain and the United States, these prime movers of modern civilisation, which proudly claimed victory in two world wars, and in the Cold War, and which until recently held themselves up as exemplars of enlightened progress, economic and cultural models to be imitated across the globe ...”

“... Simpson said on Panorama. ‘It’s off the scale of everybody’s belief system,’ said the DJ Paul Gambaccini. But it is our belief system. And now it is part of the same system to blame Savile. He’s dead, anyway. Let’s blame him for all the things he obviously was, and blame him for a host of other things we don’t understand, such as how we love ...”

“... for newts. In a tobacco tin after capture, the umber yellow mature newts lost their leopard spots, lay grounded as numb as scrolls of candied grapefruit peel. I saw myself as a young newt, neurasthenic, scarlet and wild in the wild coffee-coloured water. (‘Dunbarton’) This curves – scrolls – with animation. It easily – almost naturally ...”

“... the first time that he’d explored the topic of paedophilia, or of sadism. Sexual criminality lay at the heart of Robbe-Grillet’s nouveau roman: the original, unspeakable absence that drives his unresolved plots. Un Roman sentimental existed as an idea, and an inspiration, long before it was written. Consider Robbe-Grillet’s 1962 story ‘La Chambre ...”

“... open to the secretary of state were financial, and as punishment for the IRA’s theft of £26.5m, Paul Murphy announced on 10 March that Sinn Féin would be stripped of parliamentary allowances for Westminster worth £400,000. The next evening I drive to Moortown, a Republican area outside Cookstown, on the west side of Lough Neagh. There are pockets of ...”

“... a title, sometimes claims to be less posh than Cameron on the grounds that his public school, St Paul’s, is in London, and he didn’t board. Both sowed the seeds of tabloid merriment by joining a ludicrous club for rich boys while at Oxford, and even Cameron’s much advertised fondness for 1980s bands like The Smiths is best understood, his biographers ...”

“... and repulsive content, they would have languished had it not been for two 4Chan moderators, Paul Furber and Coleman Rogers, who persuaded a struggling YouTuber called Tracy Diaz to start making videos interpreting and embroidering the posts. The videos were a hit. As outlined in a 2018 investigation by NBC News, which suggested that Diaz and Rogers ...”

“... a genre called Black Naturalism which encompassed such writers as Richard Wright, Ann Petry and Paul Laurence Dunbar. The Black Naturalists found naturalism a ready-made mode for representing life under white supremacy. For many Black Americans, there was always a boundary in sight, setting a limit on how prosperous they could be, how happy, how free. I can ...”

“... could not permit my mind to be profaned by such intellectual whorishness’) and wrote an essay on Paul Valéry instead. ‘To know you is a calamity,’ one of his classmates told him.Schwartz would sequester himself in his room, keen to ‘impress the boys with his habit of solitude and concentration of study’. His letters to Julian Sawyer, his only close ...”