“... curator of the museum – the ‘Wonder House’. The curator is a tribute to Kipling’s father, John Lockwood Kipling, who moved to Bombay as curator of the J.J. School of Art in 1865, the year of Kipling’s birth. But through the figure of the curator, Kipling also indirectly acknowledges the existence of a colonial India of intellectual collaboration ...”

“... building, a 16th-century revision of the 13th-century church founded by the Knights of St John. The Hole is a statement and it is properly capitalised. The labourers, a self-confessed art collective, work the Hole by hand, with pick and shovel, turn and turn about: four days to complete a grave shaft, without any of the tortured grinding and ...”

“... in the play of a great free-wheeling exercised intelligence (‘I will walke heere in the Hall ... ’tis the breathing time of day with me’) makes the work what it is, the world’s most sheerly entertaining tragedy, the cleverest, perhaps even the funniest. Dr Johnson meant this when he gave it ‘the praise of variety’, adding: ‘The pretended ...”

“... them as twenty years ought to make). She may have made Gaskell up altogether. The parsonage hall is accurately rendered; perhaps Hassall took it from life.It’s not a particularly remarkable image, just the sort one comes across by accident, one of the many that illustrated the Brontës’ novels and books about them, as well as romances of famous ...”

“... getting one’s bearings. The revised English edition includes later news taking us to the Anita Hall case and the reactions to Thelma and Louise. Yet Marilyn French’s The War against Women is the more telling book. It is brief, where Faludi is excursive; it does not wear the accoutrements of research as well (it has no index), and it is written in a much ...”

“... and newspaper headline, impression and chronicle. For the middlebrow modernism of U.S.A., John Dos Passos shrewdly kept those registers apart, offering them separately on the page under the headings camera eye and newsreel. Here they are mashed together, and the effect is distinctly lumpy. There’s a reference to Firbank late in the book and perhaps ...”

“... The rather pat conclusion arrived at is that it would be wrong to consider Mrs Benson as Radclyffe Hall in a cap and bonnet. Fred remembered as a child asking his mother to explain the difference between a bull and an ox: ‘she at once said that the bull was the father and the ox the uncle.’ That the Benson brothers were oxen and uncles is beyond doubt, but ...”

“... Road to work in the Cambridge Reference Library, a dark Victorian building behind the Town Hall (gaslit in memory, though it surely can’t have been), where George III was about to make his second entrance. Sometime that autumn I bought, at Deighton Bell in Trinity Street, a copy of George III and the Politicians by Richard Pares, a book I have ...”

“... of his uncle being a farm-labourer, or the blighted life of the intelligent, radical cobbler John Antell who married into the family. Instead, Hardy exaggerates the scale of the Rockhampton cottage where he was born, his father’s status in the social scale (he attributes his comparative lack of success in the building business to his being by nature ...”

“... began to suffuse the novel, which up to then one could imagine as a sort of Russian Headlong Hall, with perfectibilians, deteriorationists, status-quo-ites contentedly discoursing while Squire Headlong-Stavrogin set a charge of dynamite to his property. Stavrogin, Kirilov and Shatov brought suffering – unacceptable to satire – into the tale. Not a ...”

“... to provide an adequate explanation or adequate documentation for the payments to any DFAC [dining-hall] subcontractors. The limited documentation that has been provided shows, for example, that KBR has added ‘overage’ factors of 10 to 35 per cent to each bill for one of the subcontractors. We still do not have an adequate explanation of the ...”

“... At one dinner party of New Age contributors, Mansfield – who was going by Yékaterina – met John Middleton Murry, an Oxford student who was starting up an art and literary magazine of his own, Rhythm. He was already her fan: ‘In a German Pension seemed to express, with a power I envied, my own revulsion from life,’ he would write in his ...”

“... played the Allegro Cantabile from Hermann’s Cello Concerto at Kennedy’s book launch in Wigmore Hall, where Hermann himself had played almost a century before. Corrie, who was at the event, said: ‘The cello being played [here] now makes the circle round.’ Five months later she told her father’s story at the European Parliament, where again Lucas ...”

“... in its favourite predilection by describing him as a ‘reformer’ (the BBC correspondent John Simpson predicted that he would mark a break with the ‘stern’ Hu, and speculated about the possibility of an elected parliament). Instead, all prospect of a more open political environment has receded. Dissidence is rare and often treated as treason. Liu ...”

“... down through the South-West and the South, back to New York and New England. The Bowery dance hall, Niagara Falls and Grand Canyon as tourist attractions, the segregated South, the college campus – these are the springboards for her efforts to comprehend the deep structure of the American world. A left-wing Tocqueville, she is struck by the paradox of ...”