“... coast in order to vote against the admission of women. He died just five weeks later. Going mixed may have felt traumatic for many men, but it raised existential questions for the women’s colleges. Like their male peers, young women were becoming less keen on single-sex institutions. As Ivy League universities moved to admit women, top schools like ...”

“... from Germany on the last train to France. He was lucky not to be arrested as a German spy. In May 1915, he arrived in Zurich, where he met Taeuber. As the painter Hans Richter put it, ‘She was Arp’s discovery, just as he was hers.’ ‘Composition of Circles and Overlapping Angles’ (1930) Both Taeuber and Arp found a place among the Zurich ...”

“... was apparently inspired by 2001: A Space Odyssey. The two cosmic heads – Buddha and spaceman – may be inert but they seem to be watching each other. As you walk past TV Buddha (1974), you glimpse yourself in the background of the video, caught up for a moment in their silent exchange. Nam June Paik’s ‘TV Buddha’ (1974) Works about surveillance ...”

“... And she said, Behold my maid Bilhah, go in unto her; and she shall bear upon my knees, that I may also have children by her. Atwood’s narrator has recently been renamed ‘Offred’, as in ‘Of Fred’, the name of the Sons of Jacob ‘commander’ who regularly attempts to inseminate her, Jacob and Bilhah style, while she lies on top of his ...”

“... about the forensic relevance of bones, speaks to the difficulty of assessing how old a bone may be (as she says, ‘setting up a murder investigation based on Roman remains is not likely to result in a solved case’). The speed with which the flesh of a corpse melts from the bone varies greatly depending on temperature, soil type and scavenger ...”

“... to become a hybrid of sorts. The unthreatening looks of a woman. The impervious core of a man.She may be in love, but she’s also on assignment, and the originality of the book lies in the way these states of being become inseparable. In a sense, she’s like the men she’s writing about, the oil workers who live two lives, one at home, one away, and her ...”

“... he was going to be killed. His best friend, a fellow schoolteacher called Oliver, was beheaded in May 2019. Ngu had enemies on both sides: he’d received death threats from the Anglophone separatist movement, and Biya’s soldiers had beaten him so badly that his body could be identified months later in Mexico by the scars.Siglo XXI, an overcrowded migrant ...”

“... in Africa was a class issue, rather than a race issue. He was on the streets of Paris during May 1968, where he was singled out by the police and beaten, escaping with a broken nose.He returned to Guinea frequently, however, to visit Sékou Touré, leader of the Parti Démocratique de Guinée (PDG). In the 1950s Touré appeared to be the unifying figure ...”

“... final few weeks and his death, ‘this difficult, tedious, painful enterprise’. That May, Noseworthy had called Gunn from Palm Springs – where he was living with his new boyfriend, the porn star Richard Locke – and told him he had Kaposi’s sarcoma. A few days later, he arrived in San Francisco to get treatment. Gunn moved into his study ...”

“... feared that the departing coloniser would leave them at the mercy of sedentary majorities. On 30 May 1958, a number of dignitaries claiming to speak for Tuaregs and ‘Moors’ – people of Berber and Arab descent – living on the bend of the Niger River wrote an open letter to de Gaulle, addressing him as ‘Your Majesty the President’. They declared ...”

“... politics, protocol and power’. In Patch Work, the museum – as employer and physical place – may be a place of paradoxes, but it isn’t a site of contestation. Imprisoned women, she notes near the end of the book, made some of the building’s mosaic floor tiles, adding in parentheses: ‘The museum loves that story.’ Coming ‘from trade’ (her ...”

“... the difference between drag and trans expression.Part of my delayed engagement with Drag Race may have been down to residual shame, having grown up with Section 28 and as a Jehovah’s Witness. It might also have had something to do with a misguided notion that the show was lowbrow and had nothing to teach me. But I came to see Drag Race as amounting to ...”

“... turmoil means that there are secret motions, out of sight, that lie concealed in matter … you may be sure this starts with atoms’). But this inference, whether Lucretian or Brownian, remained a qualitative insight. It said nothing about the real size of the invisible atoms. Even at the turn of the 20th century, a young Albert Einstein was frustrated ...”

“... a class of hereditary serfs called ‘leet men’. The only countervailing feature – one that may suggest Locke’s influence – was a very generous measure of religious toleration; atheists alone were barred from landholding. More telling still on the matter of Locke’s authorship, in 1671 the Lords Proprietors rewarded his efforts in shaping the ...”

“... is a ‘plank of wood with a hole in the middle’ and there’s no shower or bath. Her new home may seem inhospitable, but the narrator finds that focusing on the essentials banishes her ‘more trivial thoughts’. And then there’s the surrounding landscape, which ‘dips at the end of the field and vanishes into the sea, shedding everything, only to ...”