“... to admit to their society. A more illustrious example of a similar problem is provided by Duleep Singh, the deposed Sikh ruler of the Punjab who in 1854 at the age of 15 was brought to England and became a favourite of Queen Victoria. The attractiveness of his youthful person, the fervour of his proselytism to Christianity, and the fact that he had once been ...”

“... Reading may not make the world go round but it can make it go away, for a while. If one’s world is dirty, poor, oppressive and unfair, then that may be no small service. Books furnish the mind in a form that the bailiffs cannot repossess. If we could recover the reading practices of past generations, we would be in touch with an experience that was at once intimate and formative, on a par with, even part of, the history of love ...”

“... relations which does less than justice to a complex past. Hastings’s first biographer, the Rev. G.R. Gleig, was far from squeamish when introducing his controversial subject in an official, three-volume biography in 1841 (castigated as virtually ‘worthless’ by Bernstein, who is condescending to his numerous predecessors). Gleig’s admonitory words are ...”

“... such as Betye Saar and William Pope.L, and Indian artists such as Sheela Gowda and Dayanita Singh. A sequence of rooms is devoted to an important donation of Latin American art, and a large gallery is given over to contemporary Chinese work.MoMA also has to accommodate its myriad visitors, about three million per year, split equally between ...”

“... any Christian baptism – for example, that of her ill-fated protégé the maharaja Duleep Singh. Yet there was a bottom of good sense in her which held her back from favouring missionary excesses, and she was well aware of the slow progress of Christianity in India. When the Mutiny came, she was quick to conclude that, as she wrote to Charlotte ...”

“... was predicted – another of the free country’s many mutinies. The Prime Minister, V.P. Singh, has been off in the countryside performing a padyatra, a traditional politician’s walkabout, designed, a guidebook explains, to ‘raise support at the village level’. His hands are full. Terrorism apart, the worst unrest of the past few weeks has been ...”

“... doughty, ascetic, astringent English traveller who has left his privileges behind. As the years go by, Ursula’s body becomes a bore, and she experiences a fear of aging: ‘I shall have to die fairly young, because I won’t be able to live with the infirmities of old age.’ She is indeed ready to die, and it is a difficulty that Justin may feel that he ...”

“... new recruits emerging from the chatrooms with guns on their mind. On 13 September 2006, Kimveer Singh Gill went to Dawson College in Montreal and shot a group of people before killing himself. ‘I haven’t slept for three days,’ he had written in his diary, expecting that it would be read in the future by an appalled world. He hated jocks and preppies ...”

“... The astonishing importance of Leavis in the English academic consciousness does not seem to be a passing fad. The scandal-maker of the 1930s became, by a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy, part of the saving remnant on which the future of reading would depend. The photo on the cover of Denys Thompson’s The Leavises shows him in a jacket impermeable to the insults of time and with the open shirt of a Labour leader ...”

“... below 18.5. During the past twenty years models in Playboy have gone down from 19 to 16.5. Fauja Singh, the fastest man on earth over the age of 90, has a BMI of 15.4. Autism resists quantity. There are many diagnostic questionnaires, but it’s hard to quantify deficits. 3. Norms. Georges Canguilhem’s The Normal and the Pathological (1943) showed how ...”

“... kind, today’s admirers of Nehru, even some of his critics, are not to be outdone. For Manmohan Singh, his current successor in Delhi, India’s struggle for independence has ‘no parallel in history’, culminating in a constitution that is ‘the boldest statement ever of social democracy’. With no obligation to official bombast, scholars fall over ...”

“... other party. This is known as ‘closed material’. The story starts with the case of Karamjit Singh Chahal, a Sikh separatist who in 1990 sought asylum in England on the ground that his life would be threatened if he was returned to India. His claim to asylum was refused and an order for his deportation made on the basis that his continued presence was ...”

“... a plain design, black on grey. Memorials are small incidents of civic amnesia, a way of letting go. If you place such a thing on a high wall, nobody sees it. I’d worked, years ago, shifting sacks of Christmas mail, at Liverpool Street, King’s Cross and St Pancras, but I had no focused picture of the war memorials. A single day, 29 April 2005, would ...”

“... science. The US Supreme Court took the same line when, in 1923, it unanimously ruled that Bhagat Singh Thind, a high-caste Punjabi, was not a ‘free white person’ under the meaning of the 1906 Naturalisation Act. It was irrelevant that ‘the high-caste Hindu regards the aboriginal Indian Mongoloid in the same manner the American regards the negro,’ as ...”

“... in parts of Nepal during the Panchayat era – in the 1950s, a famous Communist leader called M.B. Singh travelled in the midwestern hills and acquired followers among the Magars, one of Nepal’s more prominent ethnic groups now supporting the Maoists. But Prachanda says that the ‘historic Naxalbari movement’ of India was the ‘greatest influence’ on ...”