“... the number and availability of guns in this culture has never been adequately researched. But it may be significant that one of the rare occasions in this period on which protesters did seize guns and threaten to use them was in the Liverpool seamen’s strike in 1775. It seems likely that many of the men involved had spent time in the Royal Navy and had ...”

“... footage of freeway snafu: a cortege of squad cars and outriders from Burrell’s precinct. This may not be the place, nor I the disinterested correspondent, to mull the chicken-and-egg riddle of schlocky infotainment and pulp TV news, but it is not in dispute that one follows the other in LA schedules: the first television of any kind that I absorbed ...”

“... Murry in shop-window poses with faces to match. At the time of the Cornish venture what Lawrence may have needed from Katherine was an audience for his fights with Frieda, which were growing increasingly exhibitionist. Katherine heard all the obscene abuse, saw all the punching, chasing and yelling, and no doubt had to dodge the saucepans and smoothing-irons ...”

“... very minor character ... has the right to live and breed’. It’s beautifully put, though it may have an ironic undertone (unlike actual democracies? Nabokov was not a great believer in democracy). Be that as it may, such ‘ordinary’ life can only be glimpsed in a Nabokov novel round the edge of the narrator’s ...”

“... Instead, he conjectures that the preference given to fellow Masons in jobs and contracts may have developed informally outside the Lodge, and is no more sinister than an ‘unsystemised’ old-boy network. However, there might also be a historical explanation which Piatigorsky misses. John Brewer’s pioneering work on 18th-century commercialisation ...”

“... between his sense of paternal responsibility and his own feckless parents’ lack of it. It may be just an accident of survival or typical of the reticences of the period, but the number of full and affectionate letters included in this volume which were written to Mamie and Georgina when Dickens was away from home contrasts strikingly with the absence ...”

“... tolerate no indecorum; we like that our matrons and girls should be pure.’ At times the magazine may have been little more than a mishmash of bad puns and column-fillers, but it was fit to admit into a middle-class home, even with all that snook-cocking. A hundred years later, when the paper was in the grip of an aloof priesthood, the motto was still ‘We ...”

“... publisher Gladys frères, which ‘specialised’ in sentimental erotic fiction. Even the title may well have been a joke at the expense of early readers who would have been expecting something more conventionally carnal for their 7.50 frs. Corbière, true to form, is missing from the Harvard New History of French Literature, but this official banishment ...”

“... The medievalist Marjorie Curry Woods has pointed out that schoolboys reading Pamphilus may actually have identified with Galathea. As children, they were often physically assaulted and sometimes sexually abused.Although Moriuht seems to be a poem for adults, children appear throughout the story. Sometimes they are victims. Moriuht practises his ...”

“... his job description.There’s just enough religious education to convince young people that they may be damned, or worse than damned, plunged into ‘a darkness devoid of even the solace of the incandescent fires of hell’. The Church frowns on masturbation, but the code of Mexican machismo is more permissive, even allowing for deviations from ...”

“... These operations were restored to topicality after Charles Richardson’s escape from prison in May 1980 and his subsequent letter to the Times. The first question which needs to be asked is whether such books should be written at all. And if they are written, should any serious notice be taken of them? The existence of violent, sadistic and resourceful ...”

“... minimalist works, and to some extent of Einstein. When you look at what’s being repeated, you may wonder at the tolerance of those who can happily sit for ten or 15 minutes at a stretch listening to the same commonplace two or four-beat figure over and over, without audible variation. Compare the opening of Akhnaten with the introduction to Handel’s ...”

“... there is no point in making it seem even more serious by taking it too seriously.’ Hartigan may not have entirely agreed. In the early 1950s Hartigan dated Walter Silver, who ended up documenting much of the scene, photographing readings, exhibitions, magazine launches and parties. There are photos of Hartigan learning to silk-screen, bent over the tray ...”

“... figures of Oedipus and Antigone, giving the interpersonal a social and political resonance, and it may be that the contemporary relevance of that project accounts for part of the timeliness of Quin’s reappearance. The other writings collected in The Unmapped Country cover, as far as can be told, something over ten years, and some are more interesting than ...”

“... sees his teetotalism as a reaction to his father’s drinking, just as his manic work rate may have been a riposte to his father’s fecklessness. On one estimate he wrote at least a quarter of a million letters and postcards. Joyce, also the child of a bibulous father, was something of a downstart too; but at least he belonged to the majority Catholic ...”