“... In a gloss on the snot riddle in his book Rubbish Theory: The Creation and Destruction of Value, Michael Thompson explains that the riddle succeeds by playing upon that which is residual to our system of cultural categories. When, in the context of wealth and poverty, we talk of possessable objects we unquestioningly assume that we are talking about ...”

“... almost have been put up by visiting aliens. Hillenbrand’s account of the remains of the Timurid White Palace at Shahr-i Sabz in particular provokes Volneyish thoughts about the ruin of empire: ‘Like some gigantic Ozymandias, a solitary iwan rears its vast and trunkless mass from out of the surrounding desolation. Indeed, one of its now vanished Persian ...”

“... the majority were women, but not a large majority. I think the queue was disproportionately non-white, but that is said without much conviction. There seemed to be a considerable number of tourists both in the queue, Americans particularly, and in the crowd, where a great many Italians and Spaniards were taking photographs. There is a view that the reaction ...”

“... for their own names. Indeed, this has been a central function of indexes since the great days of white male writers, when William F. Buckley sent Norman Mailer a copy of his book The Unmaking of a Mayor and wrote ‘Hi!’ in the index next to Mailer’s name. Job’s comforters will want to be the first to tell you that the entry for ‘clocks and ...”

“... primitive banks and setting up grey markets with the tacit approval of royal officials. And, as Michael Kwass showed in his brilliant Contraband (which I discussed in the LRB of 8 January 2015), where legal workarounds failed, criminal gangs stepped in with huge smuggling operations.Fashionable clothing was just one of the products flooding into urban ...”

“... Reagan debates. In 1988, mounted on a concealed ‘pitcher’s mound’ to conceal his shortness, Michael Dukakis took on George Bush’s viciously conservative campaign in their first debate (‘Of course the vice-president is questioning my patriotism … and I resent it’), only to confirm his reputation as ‘metronome man’ with an icy answer to a ...”

“... gateLovely aerial beetles of wonderful scintillateStrangest interest, and puffs of soft purest white –Soaking light, dispersing colouring for fancy’s delight.Of Maconachie, Paxton, Tickler, and Gloucester’s Stephens;Fray Bentos, Spiller and Baker, odds and evensOf trench foodKate Kennedy thinks he was equally talented in words and music: ‘The only ...”

“... leg of a dead Moor. The man awoke to find himself healed, but for the rest of his life, he had one white leg and one black. Not all miracles healed. The saints could also liberate prisoners, bring rain or fair weather, give children to the barren and bring about victory in combat or in court. But when scorned, they wrought ferocious miracles of ...”

“... Poets Press, which would go on to publish around thirty books, including titles by Clive Matson, Michael McClure and John Ashbery as well as Audre Lorde’s collection The First Cities.Despite her centrality to the community of artists and writers on the Lower East Side, di Prima’s work was never afforded the same respect as her fellow male ...”

“... century has Staphylococcus aureus, as MRSA, attracted much attention from British politicians. Michael Howard’s mother-in-law died from a hospital infection and he made its control an issue in the 2005 general election campaign. Risk theorists say that top-level support for safety spending is much greater for air travel than for oil refineries because ...”

“... the face of increasing ‘coloured immigration’, a good campaign slogan would be ‘Keep England White’. Somehow he staggered through four years in this way, confiding to Colville on his last night at No. 10: ‘I don’t believe Anthony can do it.’ Given that Churchill’s opinion was quite widely shared, it seems surprising now that Eden was allowed to ...”

“... motion to be made standing between him and his taking of the oath.’ The leader of the House, Sir Michael Hicks-Beach, rose to object. The speaker silenced him, reminding him that Hicks-Beach had himself not yet taken the oath. And that was the end of it. What is so remarkable is that Bradlaugh took the oath, which is precisely what he had sought not to do at ...”

“... upheavals – were linked, and should be treated in tandem. And while Palmer concentrated on white revolutionaries, in his 1938 classic, The Black Jacobins, C.L.R. James successfully revived interest in the slaves and free blacks active in Saint-Domingue’s revolution in 1791. Arguing that liberty, equality and fraternity meant even more to the enslaved ...”

“... for the patria’ – the words inscribed on monuments to the Nationalist war dead, as recorded in Michael Richards’s excellent monograph After the Civil War.* The defeated Republican half of Spain was commonly referred to in the press as ‘the Red horde’. Hundreds of thousands of them were killed by Nationalist paramilitaries in a largely planned attempt ...”

“... man has no ready buttress for his self-regard. That historian is fictional: he is the narrator of Michael Young’s 1958 satire The Rise of the Meritocracy. But the only thing significantly off the mark about his dystopian predictions is that his narrator is saying these things, as opposed to merely thinking them. Mount’s Uppers do, broadly speaking, think ...”