“... my maturity, at bus stops, in shops, and of course up and down the Kilburn High Road … The words may be different but the spirit is the same.’As she worked on the play, Smith noticed ‘sympathetic rhymes’ between Chaucer’s period and her own. In Alysoun’s insistence on women’s ‘sovereigntee’ over men, for instance, Smith sees an emphasis on ...”

“... style of the books has its quirks,’ Summerson complained: ‘an affectation (it may be) of looseness – like notes on the back of an envelope’.Leaving aside the question of how he imagined the books could be written except by means of rapid notes, ‘looseness’ is exactly the wrong word to describe Pevsner’s prose. With the exception ...”

“... But that only makes my enjoyment of your artistry more of a subjection.’ Worth notes that James may have been more impressed than he was willing to admit. After Hauntings appeared, he returned to writing supernatural fiction, aligning himself with Lee’s reformulation of the mid-century conventions. His equivocal The Turn of the Screw (1898) has much in ...”

“... alchemy or his interests in astrology, numerology and biblical prophecy. Whatever madness may have crept into his method (possibly a result of mercury poisoning), natural philosophy had different boundaries to modern science, encompassing – or porous to – the supernatural. The alchemical papers at King’s have produced several books, most ...”

“... surprising that oil-based monomaterialist theories of modernity prevail. But transition theory may not have become so dominant had it not been for the advent of the ‘nuclear age’. The promise of nuclear power was great. Many thought it had the potential to replace all other energy sources and thus to bring about a true energy transition. However, the ...”

“... that an apocalyptic answer to the question just posed is wrong. The pedestrians on their iPhones may look like isolate, properly subservient individuals, carrying their commodity world with them, locked into TikTok immediacy. But they aren’t there yet. The spectacle is always hybrid, partly embroiled in the past – society lives on in it, feeding it ...”

“... to which Gandhi would go to pander to Muslims.When Savarkar was released from the Andamans, in May 1921, he had to make up for lost time. His decade in exile had cost him the chance of inheriting the position of pre-eminent Hindu leader in the national movement from his hero, Bal Gangadhar Tilak. That position now belonged to Gandhi. Essentials of Hindutva ...”

“... is so complete that its roots struggle to absorb water and minerals on their own. The fungus may also be extracting sugars and lipids from other nearby plants, further servicing the flower’s needs. Voyria clearly has a good thing going, but what’s in it for the fungus? Does the flower give its fungal partner something in exchange, or is it a true ...”

“... making him ‘among the very richest people’ in Europe. Despite this, he died, to use Theresa May’s phrase, a ‘citizen of nowhere’, and his estate, as Jessica Marglin details in this absorbing microhistory, became the subject of celebrated lawsuits.Shamama was born in the hāra, the old Jewish quarter of Tunis. His family were influential but ...”

“... him, writing: ‘All of us who were at [the university of] Basle have come to nothing.’ This may not have been baseless self-deprecation: an acquaintance warned him that ‘I have never seen students rise. They are always more remiss and prone to slacking.’ Rütiner noted ruefully how this had been said ‘in a harsh tone, as if they were reproaching ...”

“... children under five. This is famine-level, but the surveys were already out of date. In early May, the same places were visited again and child malnutrition rates were said to have reached 50 per cent.At the beginning of the year the UN estimated that 4.5 million people in Tigray – roughly two-thirds of the population – were in need of emergency ...”

“... in at the thick end of eight hundred pages across eighty chapters, when Hegel says quantity itself may be a quality? When after a book and a half’s worth there is another book’s worth, and more, to come? The modestly titled Story of a Life is in fact only half the story (it’s the first three volumes of a set of six), so that we finish it, if we ...”

“... the last, to employ the information dump as a literary technique. But this is some dump.Trevelyan may well have conceived of Two Thousand Million Man-Power as the sort of novel of ideas Bennett would never have attempted. There’s a clue in the title. The phrase occurs in Ian Colvin’s ‘Social Survey of the World To-Day’, a chapter in the eighth and ...”

“... his meat into his room’, although the author, mindful of ‘my mother and father who may come across this book’, tells us that what transpired would be ‘better experienced than heard’. The pair get married but Mabel, having tasted her first man, must taste others because ‘I don’t get what I want out of life by tying myself down.’ By ...”

“... argued that African Americans – ‘especially if we are potential writers’ – may be ‘more than ordinarily concerned’ with the associations their names carry with them.Everett was born in Georgia and raised in South Carolina. He studied with the logician Howard Pospesel at the University of Miami, where he read Frege, Wittgenstein and ...”