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“... even idealise it.’ In Purity and Danger (the first and still the last word on these matters), Mary Douglas writes about the Nyakyusa, who ‘venerate their own detritus and sweep rubbish onto mourners, their ritual of mourning being to welcome filth’. An obsessional culture on the other hand – Western culture – is guilty, unsettled in the ...”

“... his own creations. He treats all the real people, from the editor of the Daily Mirror to Sir Alec Douglas-Home (as he then was), with tact and courtesy. This makes life difficult for the reviewer, who cannot be so condemnatory about real people as about fictional, and to some degree hampers the author: the real people he describes may seem too predictable for ...”

“... sides of the family, he inherited the Court connections of his mother, a lady-in-waiting to Queen Mary. At the age of 12 he was a Page of Honour to George V and in the late 1940s Private Secretary to Princess Elizabeth. From Harrow, and Trinity College, Cambridge, he entered the diplomatic service the year before Munich, and thoroughly approved ...”

“... the Scotsman William Small was teaching Rhetoric and Belles Lettres to Jefferson at William and Mary. By 1768 John Witherspoon from the Laigh Kirk, Paisley, was basing his Princeton lectures on Blair’s Rhetoric. In 1781 Wither spoon coined the pejorative term ‘Americanism’, by analogy with ‘Scotticism’. Strong connections between Scottish and ...”

“... on every one of his estates’. Tailyour began a relationship with an enslaved woman, Polly, born Mary Graham, who was described as ‘mulatto’ on the baptismal certificates of her and Tailyour’s children. Like William Macpherson, Tailyour decided to free his growing family. ‘Having now for several years experienced [Polly’s] care and attention … I ...”

“... popular song. When, after the death of their 11-year-old son Willie, Lincoln and his wife Mary arrange for seances in the White House, we learn about the popularity of spiritualism. Mention of Uncle Tom’s Cabin leads to a discussion of the emotional intensity of mid-century writing and what Reynolds calls the ‘opportunistic sensationalism’ of ...”

“... in lunatic asylums. One of the most prolific contributors was a relative of Furnivall’s, William Douglas, described in the census as ‘Lunatic, Imbecile and Idiot’. Douglas made words relating to the body his subject of study. He had a particular interest in the brain and its workings, supplying slips for ...”

“... their own names. Punch’s leading writers sheltered behind initials or pseudonyms – ‘Q’ for Douglas Jerrold, ‘The Fat Contributor’ for Thackeray. Gradually the collective views were melded into the figure of Mr Punch, an attention-seeker who gave himself walk-on parts in affairs of state; at times he might be roguish, at others tiresome. At least he ...”

“... In 1975 the DUP’s co-founder and leader, the Reverend Ian Paisley, referred to the Virgin Mary as ‘the Madonna of the Common Market’. The DUP has remained robustly opposed to the dangers of a ‘European super-state’, though there is no longer the same obsessive concern with the colour of the pope’s socks. Indeed, by 2016 Ulster hardliners ...”

“... of all the debutantes promenading into print and creating a stir: Donna Tartt, David Leavitt, Mary Gaitskill, Lorrie Moore, Amy Hempel, Nancy Lemann, Susan Minot, Mary Robison, Anderson Ferrell – a cast of dozens. Many of those rookies trained at the literary dojo of the author, editor, creative writing teacher and ...”

“... became a ‘celebrity’: a boutique director as fervently admired by Hollywood royalty – Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, Charlie Chaplin – as he was in the European salons and cine-clubs. October (1928), which begins with the abdication of Nicolas II and concludes with the storming of the Winter ...”

“... prototypical pantomime dame was also a topical skit on a Covent Garden brothel-keeper, ‘Mother Douglas’, whose recent conversion to Methodism provided the kind of ready-made comedy of modern manners on which he thrived. All these were Foote star-turns in plays which he wrote, produced and – in the sketchy 18th-century sense of the word – directed. He ...”

“... is an easy (and wrong) attack on your position at this stage of discussion,’ writes poet Douglas Oliver in a letter Sinclair quotes, verbatim, in White Chapell. ‘It is that you have involved yourself with a sort of demonology and that doing so was an emotional error akin to that, say, of becoming involved in sex magic.’ Oliver is worried ...”

“... and ‘A Lost Masterpiece’, an essayistic work of fiction by George Egerton – the pen name of Mary Chavelita Dunne, winningly known to her friends as Chav – in which a writer’s sacred reveries are suddenly destroyed by a woman with big feet. All this was interspersed with arresting illustrations by Aubrey Beardsley and Walter Sickert.The Yellow Book ...”

“... as the passing of a more graceful age. Lee’s biographers used to fall into the second camp. Douglas Southall Freeman’s four-volume biography, published in 1934 and 1935, was the standard text for many decades. Freeman drove past Lee’s statue in Richmond every day on his way to work and saluted it. But more recent biographers, even those on the ...”