“... of Mendonça’s campaign, Nafafé shows that abolitionism began not with William Wilberforce and Thomas Clarkson, but with a transnational African movement a century earlier. In order to make this case, he has to reconstruct the complex and intertwined worlds of Angola, Brazil and Southern Europe in the 17th century. The Portuguese arrived in Angola in the ...”

“... Paradise is about unmitigated light, before it drains through the spheres to the earth. Nature, St Thomas explains in Canto xiii, cannot transmit these remains of the divine day, but fumbles them ‘like an artificer/Who knows his trade but has a trembling hand’. There is far more scope for the artist in the observation of ...”

“... belonged to the fallen world around you … To know this struggle in the dark was to know more than you needed about Original Sin, natural depravity and the thin pretences on which the maintenance of human dignity depends.’There it is: the twilight childhood of Robert Stone, who wrote eight substantial novels about natural depravity in a fallen ...”

“... and the City, a lengthy, rather formal account of his childhood and youth, heavily influenced by Thomas Wolfe. The novel had made little impression, and Kerouac himself had swiftly turned against it, finding its traditional style and form far too restrictive. Influenced by the creative improvisation of jazz musicians, in contact with Abstract Expressionist ...”

“... that these were bee boxes, used for transporting live bees. But the conversation was evidently more searching than Forster’s account suggests. Nearly seven years later, Lawrence writing from Taos assured Forster that ‘Yes, I think of you – of your saying to me, on top of the downs in Sussex – “How do you know I’m not dead?” ’ It was a good ...”

“... heart for every fate’: the title Marchand has chosen, from the enchanting lyric Byron wrote to Thomas Moore in 1817, doesn’t seem quite appropriate. It would have been better to borrow Doris Langley Moore’s Lord Byron: Accounts Rendered, for in these months in Genoa (October 1822 – June 1823) Byron was settling his accounts with his creditors, with ...”

“... emptinesses, there are 1200 miles of usually rough ocean between Sydney and Auckland, and even more of social, historical and climatic difference. Australia at large is all drama and exaggeration, Two memories come to mind: one, a Fifties newsreel showing sheep dying of drought under dead trees high in the branches of which were the carcasses of animals ...”

“... of each operation … Quality is quantifiable!’ Henry conspires with his brother Thomas, a dodgy banker who is quick to recognise ‘the huge profits which were to be made from the government’s privatisation programme’. Then there’s Dorothy Winshaw, the owner of a company that produces cheap meat products and the developer of a small ...”

“... in the Poe poem that the line ‘donner un sens plus pur aux mots de la tribu’ occurs) and ever more giddying feats of abolition, the Prynne poem actively invites contamination, draws to itself the rags and rubbish (the ‘matter out of place’) that poetry typically excludes or refines. Its language is a site of migrating meanings, shifts of ...”

“... pictures, propped up in bed. Blackburn’s book is composed of digressions, an associative dérive more than a biographical account. One of the central notions is ‘drifting’, which becomes the book’s ostensible method: I cannot find what has been lost, no matter how often I search for it. All I can do is to hold a few facts and images in my mind’s eye ...”

“... For the Sake of Argument records a life of action, of being in the right place at the right time. Thomas Mann could never find the revolution: Hitchens cannot help tripping over it. This is, no doubt, the privilege of the foreign correspondent, but some are clearly more privileged than others. He turns up in Central ...”

“... required to draw a map of old Palestine, ‘indicating the position of the Jewish tribes’. Thomas Jervis’s map of the Crimean peninsula Biblical Palestine loomed large in the teaching of geography for generations of British children: I can remember drawing maps of it at Sunday school in the 1960s, to accompany my own newspaper supplement featuring ...”

“... dead white males. Since then, there have been efforts to expand disciplinary canons to incorporate more women and greater racial and ethnic diversity. At first glance, the inclusion of Catharine Macaulay’s writings in the influential Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought looks like a straightforward example of this. But there is a less obvious ...”

“... next, which looks like the front of a Eurostar train, for M; while in 1819 the British polymath Thomas Young thought the lion stood for OLE; the Eurostar for MA; the two feathers for I; and the bent line, probably a fold of cloth, for OS: ‘Thus we have precisely PTOLEMAIOS.’What Champollion did was unsheathe Occam’s razor, dispense with syllabograms ...”

“... demonstrating, rather neatly it was thought (by the then sitting tenant of this space in the LRB, Thomas Jones, among others), that at the end of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, Hercule Poirot hit on a wrong solution to the crime, that the too devious Dame Agatha had for once thrown even herself off the scent. I was on the point of adding that, of course, this ...”