“... I is haunted by some ugly, not quite spoken event. And something that’s never named happens to May Sinclair’s young Harriet Frean down the lane where her parents do not want her to go. With McBride, it is all up front (in your face, as one might say). Seen in this light, the familiar account of modernism starts to look a bit coy or straitlaced. What ...”

“... troll’s amorality as bound up with the familiar masculinist fantasy of ironclad superiority. It may be that all trolls are, among other things, gendertrolls. If that is true, the troll’s self-image as a ‘trickster’, which Phillips takes seriously, doesn’t stand much scrutiny. The trickster is a figure whose only value is the destruction of ...”

“... the poverty line means these figures probably downplay the true extent of poverty, since people may dip below the threshold multiple times during the year. ‘Hard work’, the rhetorical wedge dividing the working class into classless ‘strivers’ and feckless ‘scroungers’, is now visibly detached from the promise of disposable income or job ...”

“... have to explain why Verhofstadt’s basic argument is wrong. The EU doesn’t work well, and that may be reason enough for some to want to leave, but whoever stays has to face the reality that making the Eurozone and the Union’s common external border – to take just the most glaring failings – function properly will require more integration. Further ...”

“... a mention of a ‘magic, incantatory function’. Jakobson gives examples: a Lithuanian spell (‘May this sty dry up, tfu, tfu, tfu, tfu’) a North Russian incantation (‘Water, queen river, daybreak! Send grief beyond the blue sea, to the sea bottom, like a grey stone never to rise from the sea bottom, may grief never ...”

“... figure of Oedipus and other paternal ghosts haunting Cocteau’s work, Arnaud speculates that he may have paid ‘with a secret guilt: as if he secretly held himself responsible for a disappearance that had opened up the favours of his mother exclusively to him’. Later in life, mother and son shared an apartment on the rue d’Anjou, with Madame ...”

“... Their ‘evil mélange of decrepit Presbyterianism and imperialist thuggery, whose spirit may be savoured by a few mornings with the Edinburgh Scotsman and a few evenings watching Scottish Television, appears to be solidly represented in the Scottish National Party.’ The version of nationalism represented by the SNP offered no hope: they were ...”

“... or reflections of walls or trees’. The crowded inner city setting of Gutter Lane may not have offered this luxury – in 1600 he complained that ‘the lights thereof [were] darkened by the annoyance of one of the next neighbours’ building.’ The scrupulous cleanliness of the studio, ‘where neither dust, smoke, noise nor stench ...”

“... for political education and morale. With this Soviet Polish Army he fought his way to Berlin in May 1945. In June ownership of his division was transferred to Poland, under the Moscow-approved government in waiting of Bołeslaw Bierut, and it was as a member of what was now the Polish Internal Security Corps, the KBW, that Bauman went to Warsaw.Bauman’s ...”

“... her from the pictures. As a young woman she was lively-looking and attractive (‘rare beauty’ may be going too far), but her face becomes more strained over time, the expression more set. She and Takhtarev returned to Russia in 1906, and she gave birth to a son, Misha, not long after, when she must have been almost forty. But then the story turns sad: she ...”

“... than those of Heinrich von Kleist and Henriette Vogel, who died together on 21 November 1811. ‘May heaven grant you a death even half as joyous and inexpressibly cheerful as mine,’ Kleist wrote to his sister. He was ‘blissfully happy’, he told his cousin, and looking forward to this ‘most splendid and pleasurable of deaths’. Vogel called it ...”

“... and ancient and responsible for our most base behaviour, and that childhood nightmares of monsters may be traces of ancestral encounters with dinosaurs. (Like the idea that the heart is the centre of emotion, this seems to me a poetically precise description of a real phenomenon.) The connection of dopamine to addictive behaviour – Cobb cites a Facebook ...”

“... him how to look at painting. Though still in high school, Bois is swept up by the events of May 1968, after which he connects radical art with radical politics whenever he can, an avant-garde commitment that is affirmed when he meets the Brazilian artist Lygia Clark two years later. In 1969, aged seventeen, Bois is offered an opportunity to exhibit his ...”

“... of flintlock at dawn, but it is still associated with a certain glamour. The high-living image may hold true for some American ambassadors, many of whom are big donors and political appointees, but it’s not a realistic picture for most diplomats. In fact, diplomats are often quite isolated from the societies to which they are posted. Their central task ...”

“... and treat the army as it deserved to be treated. Sympathetic commanders were canvassed. On 15 May 218, Heliogabalus, Maesa, Soaemias and the boy’s tutor left Emesa under cover of darkness for the camp of the Legio III Gallica at Raphaneae. Their reception there was not guaranteed, but they were hopeful. The legion, despite its name, had been quartered ...”