“... Fish. Fish’s salaries and lecture fees have been part of the lore of academic culture since David Lodge’s Changing Places (1975), where he appeared thinly disguised as Morris Zapp, who, ‘enviably offered his first job by Euphoria State, had stuck out for twice the going salary, and got it’; and who had ‘the professional killer instinct’ in a ...”

“... are still in evidence:        Causing the charm, the pause never so alertly        held abeyantly to flood entire        its moderate premium diving like a crashed star in salt water, outbroken fire. In Prynne’s poems we find metamorphoses, spectacular and menacing natural phenomena, manmade disasters and cosmic ructions tapering down ...”

“... great deal about access to holy places. As a ten-year-old altar boy in a Carmelite convent, he had held the position of ‘gatekeeper’, so that whenever a novice took the veil and vanished behind the walls for good, it was the hand of a future Marxist literary theorist which opened, then fatefully closed, the portals. As the title of his memoir ...”

“... to support as many family members as possible, at the expense of productivity. Early modern states held that the elderly were the responsibility of their relations. In England, the Poor Law of 1601 stated that ‘the father and grandfather, mother and grandmother and children of every poor, old, blind, lame and impotent person, or other poor person not able to ...”

“... officials; an offer from the president of the GAA to have Darren Graham as his guest at a big game held at the association’s imposing main stadium in Dublin; an eventual apology from the Fermanagh GAA, leading to Graham’s decision to return to the game. Somewhere behind the coverage, though, there was a sense of something not being said. Colm Bradley, a ...”

“... extended feature for Vanity Fair. We learn that Bob Dylan adored her in Raintree County and that David Lynch kissed her after the 1987 Oscars (she was a fan of Blue Velvet) and that she resented Andy Warhol for making millions by turning her face into a silk screen image. What the book doesn’t do is discuss Taylor’s film performances in any depth. This ...”

“... threatens to rise even further under Liz Truss), so this should be easy enough. But the SNP has held power in Scotland for fifteen years and has its own list of embarrassments, notably in the areas of public health, education and industrial policy. Compared to low life expectancy, the highest rate of drug-related deaths in Europe and the near total foreign ...”

“... Near the end of his life, dogged by criticism of the Free State, Leopold destroyed many papers held at the International African Association, a propaganda organisation created in Brussels in the 1870s to press his claims in central Africa. But there is still a mass of documents to re-examine at the museum – on at least three kilometres of shelving – in ...”

“... of the high-profile economists they signed up as advisers in 2015, including Thomas Piketty and David Blanchflower (who tweeted ‘he has no economic policies’). Corbyn’s former policy chief, Neale Coleman, who was often described as the most effective member of his team, has now been announced as a top adviser to his opponent in the leadership ...”

“... envisaged both by Article 53 of the convention and by Section 11 of the Human Rights Act itself. David Cameron advocates replacement of the Human Rights Act with a bill of rights and responsibilities entrenched against repeal. Gordon Brown advocates a new constitutional document ‘in parallel’, as the recent green paper puts it, with a bill of rights and ...”

“... before men had a word for it. How indeed could they have a word for it until it had happened? David Underdown, one of the five big names contributing to this festschrift, has a characteristically wise survey of ‘Community and Class’ in the English Revolution. Disregarding Hexter’s prohibitions, he concludes: ‘The Marxist model of local political ...”

“... danger. It was then that we suspected the police were involved.’ The men were afraid. They held meetings, trying to work out what to do. They still had supplies of toothpaste, vinegar and salt, and mixed these with the water that dripped from the rocks.For weeks, they had no contact with the surface world. Then, in early November, pamphlets headed ...”

“... until now, was Thomas Keneally, whose novel Towards Asmara (1989), set in the guerrilla-held areas at the time of the liberation war, was a picaresque homage to the Eritrean people. Michela Wrong has attempted something different: an idiosyncratic, free-ranging history of Eritrea, from colonial times to the present, marvellously full of ...”

“... filed into the Maverick Concert Hall near Woodstock to hear a piano recital by the young virtuoso David Tudor. That they should be here, tucked away in the Catskills, was already extraordinary. The Maverick is more hermitage than concert hall: a wooden, barn-like structure, set – in 1952 at least – in several acres of woodland. Water Music by John Cage, a ...”

“... crashing at high speeds. Nader began to pursue the idea that automobile manufacturers could be held liable for unsafe design. Moving to Washington in 1963, he took a job as a part-time consultant for Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the assistant secretary of labour, who assigned him to prepare a report on car safety. The result was Unsafe at Any Speed (1965), a ...”