“... to believe in a parallel world of different texts, or a random world of any and every text, or a black hole of absent texts which resembles a kind of Mallarméan mass demo. Collectively, they wish to ‘puncture English’s pretensions to cultural centrality’ by turning it into something even woollier called ‘Cultural Studies’. They recommend the ...”

“... and adventurous than the English; but neither the Beat Poets of San Francisco, nor the Black Mountain Group, nor the confessional and autobiographical poets that followed, could be said to have produced great art.’ (‘Alas,’ thought Harvard despondently, ‘there goes our candidate, Lowell.’) Worse was to come. ‘By the mid-Sixties the ...”

“... onto the stage only once, with the revolt of the peasants of Upper Austria in 1626. They carried black flags bearing a skull and the words ‘It must be,’ because, as Wedgwood remarks, they knew that ‘the revolt would probably mean death for its leaders, whether they won or lost.’ However, neither she nor Gerhard Benecke, in the brief space allotted to ...”

“... Mazzetti, then a student at the Slade, made a film called Together, with her fellow artists Michael Andrews and Eduardo Paolozzi playing the main parts. She shot it in the bombed-out East End, which gaggles of children had made their territory; her camera catches the wild scrambling, dash and hurtle of scores of boys and girls playing together in the ...”

“... extended Greek world (though a concluding section explores the early colonies in Sicily and the Black Sea, contact zones between Greek and non-Greek religions in the Near East, Egypt and India, and makes comparisons between China and Greece). The effect of this relative restriction is to present Greek religion as a unified field within a coherent, stable ...”

“... on the Daily Worker he went to Tribune, where Robert Edwards was leaving to join Beaverbrook and Michael Foot, recently a Beaverbrook man, was acting editor. (Will Mervyn Jones also end up in the Beaverbrook stable? the reader anxiously wonders.) Tribune paid him £16 a week to spread himself over the paper and, after Suez, he helped Foot with that instant ...”

“... descendant of the parrot given to Shakespeare in 1610 as a gift by his friend and fellow poet Michael Drayton. The Bard was exceedingly fond of the bird, and would speak to her as one might write in a journal – to chronicle, reflect and confess. When he died of fever six years later, Anne Hathaway kept the parrot, and introduced into its cage a younger ...”

“... in the beads of rain on their hair. Standing slightly to one side of the group, framed by the black fence, was a young albino. He was staring at Caleb. His curly hair was as yellow as butter, but he had the build of a Una boy, from his broad face to his wide feet and distended belly. The sun had been at work on his pink skin for ten years, staining it ...”

“... the Germans were in full murder mode. Historical information and interpretation, based largely on Michael Marrus and Robert Paxton’s Vichy France and the Jews, have also been added. The 2503 photographs themselves: these have been reproduced from identity cards and gravestones, from formal studio portraits and intimate snapshots, from school, camp and ...”

“... To read some of this work, you would think that the worst thing to happen to Ireland wasn’t the Black and Tans but heteronormativity. The most advanced thinkers in the Handbook regard same-sex marriage as suspect, a mode of homonormativity that pinkwashes neoliberalism and makes corporate power look progressive (think Leo Varadkar). With normativity being ...”

“... out to be a writer of no necessary distinction, a former star, reduced now to the status of a ‘black hole’. By the middle of the 20th century, firmly in the possession of research-minded professors and the staple of many of their careers, Shakespeare appeared to speak only the patois of Modernism. As intimate with foreign cultures as Joyce, as widely ...”

“... of a ‘national crisis’. On 1 April 1996, the Monday of Easter week, the then Home Secretary, Michael Howard, made a surprise statement full of foreboding about imminent IRA violence and the need for immediate legislation to prevent it. Various lacunae in the law had been discovered which it was now suddenly deemed essential to fill. Naturally, having ...”

“... of the book, all layers of imperial society have been included in the tale; its gifted translator, Michael Hofmann (who has done more than any other living translator to bring us Joseph Roth in English), nicely calls it ‘a fairy story that has swallowed a novel’. The fable begins with an official visit to Vienna, sometime in the late 19th century, by the ...”

“... racism ‘was likely to have been an influencing factor’ in the strip-searching last year of a Black teenage girl wrongly suspected of carrying cannabis at school. In November, an inspection report found that a culture of ‘misogyny, sexism, predatory behaviour towards female police officers and staff and members of the public’ was ‘prevalent’ in ...”

“... danger, from which they were saved only by his death seven years later. Our author and his son Michael were born in the safety of South Africa and England only because the rabbi’s untimely demise left a penniless widow and nine children with no means of support and no choice but to emigrate. Of course, Heshel could not have known what was coming, and ...”