“... for medieval culture. (Readers who prefer modern English can consult the excellent translation by William Granger Ryan, published by Princeton in 1993.) Pious instruction, sensational entertainment, conservative propaganda, erotic titillation, sacred violence – the Golden Legend offered all these and more. Most obviously, it offered a way to hallow ...”

“... thing in itself. Like W.E.B. Du Bois, Paul Robeson, Charlotta Bass, Claudia Jones and William Patterson in the 1940s and 1950s, the Black Panther Party connected the oppression of black America to people of colour around the globe, linking the internal struggle against racism in the US to anti-imperial struggles in Africa, Asia and Latin ...”

“... lukewarm scepticism are written out of the conservative version of America’s origins, along with Thomas Jefferson’s probing criticism of the Platonised mythologies which disfigured the message of Socrates’ true successor as moral teacher, the man Jesus. Jefferson was – at least nominally – an Episcopalian. What seems like hypocrisy to us now was then ...”

“... in Redland, in a house now part of the university. In his teens, Sidgwick went to Rugby. Although Thomas Arnold had died in 1841, the school retained the impress of his high-minded and reforming personality, and Sidgwick’s mother overcame her doubts about English boarding schools – though she took up residence in a house opposite the school, which ...”

“... and carted off to the paved surroundings of London, to the Artillery Ground in the City or Thomas Lord’s first ground in Dorset Square. In one small but intriguing respect, the terrain was a factor: the chalk of the Downs, both South and North, proved better stuff to pitch a wicket on in the days when all the bowling was done underarm, because the ...”

“... ideology. In this, too, Marx is at one with his compatriot Friedrich Nietzsche, and indeed with William Blake. Such an ethics is not, needless to say, without its difficulties. As a curious cross-breed of Aristotle and Romantic humanism, it tends to assume that human powers become morbid only by virtue of being repressed. It is not clear that this is the ...”

“... Firesides contest with the inscription ‘Yea, I have a goodly heritage.’ Unexpectedly, however, William Jennings Bryan, who prosecuted John Thomas Scopes for promoting evolutionary theory in the 1920s, turns out to have been less of a villain than he is usually painted. Scopes may have famously defended evolution, but he ...”

“... Stone was born in August 1937, nine months after Don DeLillo and three – we’re told – after Thomas Pynchon. Dog Soldiers, his second novel, made his name in the mid-1970s, and since then he has stubbornly held his ground on the upper slopes of American literary life. Fellowships, prizes, grants and commissions have rarely been in short supply, and his ...”

“... As a student at St Thomas’s Hospital, I used to walk the long ‘Nightingale’ wards – Florence Nightingale had not only founded its school of nursing but was influential in the design of the building – and learned to avoid prayer-time because the way out was obstructed by the line of ‘Nightingales’ kneeling at the door in order of seniority ...”

“... obligations. 27. The 1989 invasion of Panama had a transformative effect on international law. Thomas Pickering, George H.W. Bush’s ambassador to the UN, later said that it paved the way for the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Coming just over a month after the fall of the Berlin Wall, it was justified by a hierarchy of rationales. But high on the list was the ...”

“... better the impulse to post pictures of your balls than the impulse to evangelise or bomb. When Thomas Pynchon asked the same question in Gravity’s Rainbow (‘What’s it all been for, the murdering seas, the gangrene winters and starving springs, our bone pursuit of the unfaithful, midnights of wrestling with the Beast?’), his answer was much more ...”

“... forgotten, at least in comparison to later researchers of sexuality such as Virginia Johnson, William Masters and Alfred Kinsey. In Blackouts, Torres sets out to correct the historical record by telling the fictional story of a young man encountering Sex Variants and learning about its origins from an older man, Juan Gay, who knew Jan Gay ...”

“... that of any other writer – certainly no modern Irish writer – but he has learned a lot from Thomas Pynchon. He has learned, for example, the potentially disastrous lesson that it’s possible to write a novel of ideas that’s vast in scope and light, even jaunty, in tone – to write about physics and farting side by side, not just as an exercise in ...”

“... plantation to be shared out between the dead man’s relatives.In 1834, Douglass’s new master, Thomas Auld, a mean ‘object of contempt’, believing his authority was being challenged by his insolent teenage slave, handed him over ‘to be broken’ by an overseer called Edward Covey. ‘Mr Covey succeeded in breaking me,’ Douglass wrote, ‘in ...”

“... bought in the sales, and seemed never to acquire a handbag: acquaintances remember a trusty William Morris carrier, and she took a spongebag, Hermione Lee reports, to the Booker dinner. In her letters she uses the dotty-lady schtick for two main purposes. It’s there to entertain and mollify her daughters, on whom she depended for all sorts of ...”