“... no sign that sex had much to do with the horrors of the camps. The neat juxtapositions in The White Hotel of psyche and history, of delusions of sexual violence and the massacre at Babi Yar, are of course a novelist’s trick, or perhaps a poet’s metaphor, but in any case have been found contrived and trivialising. There may be more to say for the ...”

“... hints from Baudelaire and his Gallic followers. The hero of the first novella writes mysteries as William Wilson, and gets involved in a case by taking a chance on a wrong number and doubling as the private eye asked for, Paul Auster ‘of the Auster Detective Agency’. In fact, the ingeniously-constructed Trilogy is peppered with references to Auster ...”

“... begins, least lightly. His first paragraph is a model: No conquest is free of catastrophe. Duke William came and took what he wanted. And of course there were those who got hurt. But obvious though that is, revisionist historians today dwell less on the changes imposed by the Normans than on what they were content to leave alone. That is not the way it ...”

“... with fat; an ox’s head with the skin slightly shrivelled, one dark eye open; links of red and white sausages, still more sausages, and pigs’ trotters; pale butter, dripping; draped tripe; feathered chickens with their necks slit open; a lung hanging by a windpipe; a pig’s head with near translucent ears; bowls of rendered lard to be sold by the ...”

“... turn up to see you wearing a snug designer jacket, really saggy jeans or super-tight leggings, and white sneakers. They’ll be carrying an eco bag: not any old cotton tote, but one that’s trending on Instagram – the LRB tote perhaps. Baseball caps and dramatic eyewear are among the most popular accessories. Unlike the urban middle-class generation that ...”

“... as a child, though I read about polar explorers and enjoyed the mise-en-scène of polar bears, white-outs, ice floes and the rest, the word ‘north’ exercised over me little of the magic it has for so many others, including Kavenna and Peter Davidson. ‘The Idea of North’ was the Canadian pianist Glenn Gould’s phrase and the title of a radio ...”

“... Eternal Club, the Jelly Bag Society, or the Town Smarts, whose members decked themselves out in white stockings, silver buckles and frilly shirts; and after dining at one of these, you could go on to the catch club, the poetry and philosophical club, the bell-ringing club, the antiquarian society, or a variety of benefit, cricket, botanical, rowing and ...”

“... from the Greek by Hugh Goldie (1815-95), Edinburgh, 1862; Saint Luke in Dinka (spoken on the White Nile), translated by the Roman Catholic Central African Mission, Brixen, 1866, a rare instance of a Catholic translation in a profession dominated by Protestants; Ruth and Jonah in Southern Swahili (spoken in the region of Zanzibar), translated by Edward ...”

“... father. The two families had intermarried for generations. In 1877, 40-year-old Annie Thackeray (William Thackeray’s daughter and Virginia Woolf’s step-aunt, as well as a novelist in her own right) married her nephew Richmond Ritchie, aged 23. Things turned out well, but since the Bible forbade such unions they were very rare and widely regarded as ...”

“... some success, tried to monopolise the Whig label. Their main opponents, the Pittites, who followed William Pitt the Younger, are often miscategorised as Tories, though they too described themselves as Whigs. The modern Conservative Party emerged decades later out of the Pittite grouping, which in the course of the French Revolution also absorbed the Portland ...”

“... The three figures about whom Stubbs has most to say, the poets Sir John Suckling, Thomas Carew and William Davenant, do to varying degrees answer to that description. Though his book makes no claims to archival discovery, it lights up their writing and brings fresh perception to the ties of friendship between them, to their travels and adventures and ...”

“... well have been allowed a gentler landing. But he was not any of those things: he was a Westerner, white trash, didn’t go to college, and worst of all, was a California phenom, a national success, the literary darling of the young. The long knives were well due in making an appearance. Brautigan came from the Pacific Northwest, born in Tacoma, Washington in ...”

“... that grease the gears of his or her everyday life. Feminists know this all too well: 19th-century white women opposed to being ‘treated like slaves’ remained unmoved by the enslavement of black women (and men); some women who insist on fair salaries at the office try to pay as little as they can to the people who look after their children and clean their ...”

“... over. The Palais de Chaillot and the 1937 exhibition meant to assert that man, and not only the white man, was the sum of his creations. If the calculation was correct, and it was looking decidedly wobbly, there would be peace between peoples. By 1940 Hitler, something of an expert on peoples, was being photographed on the esplanade of the Palais. (That’s ...”

“... of sensation could have dreamed up. It was a case that fascinated the eminent physician Sir William Osler, who compiled his own dossier on Barry, as well as the sexologist Havelock Ellis, who included Barry in his roster of distinguished instances of transvestism. Barry served the British army as a surgeon for 45 years, rising to the position of ...”