“... patterns. He pinpoints the birth of traumatic memory to a machine-made disaster, the train crash. John Erichsen was perhaps the first physician to describe the syndrome in the 1860s while examining victims of British railway accidents; he called it ‘railway spine’, and attributed it to vaguely defined neurological mechanisms that originated in dorsal ...”

“... homosexual “submission”, can complete a genital act “in expressing a power relationship”. John Boorman’s film Deliverance makes striking use of this theme in depicting the maltreatment of urban “trespassers” by rustic hunters.’ It is this modern view of penetration, universalised by human-zoo logic, that makes the ancient phallocracy ...”

“... home movies. The release of Kinsey has reignited an old controversy in the US. Conservative Christian groups are denouncing the film as a Hollywood whitewash which elevates a man they consider responsible for everything from Aids to child abuse into a hero. Following a carefully orchestrated campaign of complaints, some TV stations have refused to show ...”

“... the Andy Warhol Museum on Sandusky Street, where Andrew Warhola was born in 1928. As the director John Waters has said, every kid needs someone really bad to look up to, and the Warhol legacy carries on that counter-cultural role for a new generation. The museum recently organised an exhibition of the prison photographs from Abu Ghraib. In rural West ...”

“... with rather juvenile insults to religion – the Virgin was a whore, Christ was a bastard and St John was his bedfellow, and so on. It seems that one somehow needed to publicise the outrageousness of one’s heretical opinions by talking in this manner. And indeed the most curious aspect of blasphemy and profanity in general is this apparent need. What use ...”

“... granite wall. The happy ending is secured when the peasantry joins with the nobility to invoke the Christian decencies. Jones published this at 21 and it was well received. He became a close friend of Bulwer-Lytton, and introduced the spirit and style of German Romantic poetry to a London audience in his own verse. He also engaged in the favourite Victorian ...”

“... are usually given as George and Lady Mary Hamilton. The daughter appears to have been Sophia St John Hamilton. Just then Foscolo was brushing up his English by reading Sterne’s Sentimental Journey, which he later translated into Italian. The Hamiltons’ dashing and accommodating captor, according to one account published under the pseudonym Captain ...”

“... effects of different rates than on the exegesis of ancient texts. In a pamphlet from 1691, John Locke made an early, influential argument against efforts to hold down interest rates, claiming that this incentivised speculation, hurt prudent savers, and benefited only ‘bankers and scriveners’ who were ‘skilled in the arts of putting out ...”

“... religious sensibility certainly survived, to be reanimated in Anglican form in the great phase of Christian writing that spanned Donne himself, Herbert and Vaughan, Milton and Marvell; in each of the three centuries that followed, there emerged in England a different religious poetry, orthodox and unorthodox. But the historians’ negations are helpful, and ...”

“... by the much decorated Audie Murphy. Oswald fixed his time and period just as the bank robber John Dillinger confirmed both the status of the FBI and the date, 22 July 1934, by getting himself shot to pieces emerging from the Biograph in Chicago, after watching Clark Gable play an amiable gangster in Manhattan Melodrama. While trying to ignore my ...”

“... a Cafetière as sister to the immured (but undefeated) heroines of Beckett’s late monologues. John Elderfield, curator of the Portraits show, thinks the first statement of the ‘as if they were apples’ cliché may have been Charles Morice’s in 1905. Morice was the translator of Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground, so ‘loss of world’ was ...”

“... Wagner’s histrionic affectations, his popularity among German nationalists and his attraction to Christian and Buddhist doctrines of resignation and compassion. Such attitudes were, Nietzsche thought, a betrayal of the barbaric, Dionysian energies he discerned in Wagner’s music. He went on, as he put it, to ‘avenge myself on Wagner for my deceived ...”

“... it with six thousand urns containing urine. Floating irresistibly back come recollections of John Nance Garner, Vice-President of the United States, describing his own job as ‘about as much use as a pitcher of warm piss’. John Nance Garner, where are you now that we need you? The bizarrerie that pleases me most is ...”

“... at all costs,’ says James Harding. ‘He need not have worried, for Hobson was, and is, a Christian and a man of honour.’ Almost superstitiously, Agate entreated the Sunday Times to appoint Hobson as his successor and poor Alan Dent was left high and dry: ‘a brutal act of treachery’, says James Harding. By such strange chances, Hobson and Tynan ...”

“... housewife has for long been regarded by her, even if not by the law, as a family resource. It was John Hajnal in the 1960s who first alerted historians to the features of the marriage system prevailing for many centuries in Northern and Western Europe: late marriage and a sizeable proportion of permanent celibacy. The phrase ‘the Hajnal marriage ...”