“... is that her donning of an ethnic identity in multicultural Australia was not innocent. It may be funny when we learn that this Anglo-Saxon girl forced her publisher to dance a Ukrainian folk dance with her after she won the Miles Franklin Award: it is not funny that someone taking a Ukrainian identity should use it to claim that most of her family had ...”

“... rain, however, a sodden tent, and the arrival over two weeks of just one Meadow Pipit (which may well have been hopping along the coast), convinced me that Popper was absolutely right about the importance of falsification and that I myself wanted to have nothing more to do with it. I tried verification also, taking my turn in another tent on a marsh in ...”

“... of the Russian sate.’ In a telegram from the soldiers of the Nikolaevsky Maritime Battery, on 21 May 1917, comes: ‘We ask for the immediate transfer of Nicholas, Alexandra and their family to the Peter and Paul Fortress in order to institute strict surveillance and to prosecute all those sympathetic to the Romanovs as traitors to the freedom of the Russian ...”

“... when he kissed her hand. It was, Shaw said, ‘a wholly satisfactory love affair ... Let those who may complain that it was all on paper remember that only on paper has humanity yet achieved glory, beauty, truth, knowledge, virtue and abiding love.’ Shaw’s only certain physical involvement with another human being was an affair with Jenny Patterson, an ...”

“... unless they are specialists. And if this book fails to be of much interest to a general reader, it may nonetheless have an interest for a specialist – as the narrative of someone still speaking from within their illness, an extended form of medical notes, perhaps, from a patient who admits that, though she has come a long way, she is ‘not ready nor ...”

“... for either – at least not for long. Now he could change his stance from month to month. In May he could be aesthetic: September might find him veering just a shade towards the puritan. Some readers followed his fluctuating moods with fond solicitude. Others found them to be symptoms of an irritating spinelessness. Connolly was sympathetic to both ...”

“... would hand it to me slice by slice, each slice gripped firmly under that broad black thumb.’ It may have been something to do with this, but I didn’t mind about missing out on a full Wigan breakfast: we wanted to film the Liverpool pickets as the men who had taken over their work drove past them and through the dock gates at the start of their shift. My ...”

“... 1865, Ohaihai of Hanetetuua cooked in Atuona; 4 January 1866, Houpo of Haamau cooked in Atuona; 25 May 1866, Pehitumoe of Haamau eaten by Atuona. Then there were the killings without the ‘cooking’: of women by men, men by women, mothers by sons, sons by fathers, infants by adults, young by old, old by young. The death throes of the valley of Atuona were ...”

“... jabber of rival histories that will baffle the uninitiated. The many contributions from Bannister may puzzle, too. As BBC controllers go, he comes across as informal and open-minded – a dimpled prodigy from local radio. But his dialect is still jargon: ‘The important thing was to consolidate the management team.’ Whole pages of the book are given over ...”

“... Bid Me to Live (1960), and as Robert Cunningham in D.H. Lawrence’s Aaron’s Rod (1922), he may have had the misfortune to furnish the model for Sir Clifford Chatterley. Aldington’s maledictory novel, Death of a Hero, has not worn well. The parents of George, the ‘hero’, are parodic monsters. The wife, Elizabeth, and the mistress, Fanny, are the ...”

“... the contemporary interest in ‘indeterminacy, fracture and defacement in Romantic literature’ may yet transform Beddoes’s ‘failings’ into privileged literary effects. But he has been critically exhumed and then reburied several times already, and there is no guarantee that this most recent attempt won’t join that doomed tradition. Beddoes’s ...”

“... men test out the route before they themselves set on that adventure.’ Mandeville’s passage may well bring to mind the vagina dentata discussed by Freud, and he also invoked the jus primae noctis, in an article on ‘The Taboo of Virginity’. Freud situated the taboo in the psychology of women rather than men, interpreting it at first as a way for the ...”

“... Perceval, however, is named; and his naming is the pivotal event of the romance, whatever more may be to come. The giving of a name, in most of Chrétien’s romances, is what gives shape and structure to a story that otherwise might seem to have as much form as a piece of string with only one end. Enide, who shares the title of her romance with her suitor ...”

“... by a free press and the threat of elections, they do not allow their people to starve (though they may allow them to go hungry). The scandal of mass starvation is something they can’t afford. But the rural poor of Malawi have a rather different theory of famine. Evidently they think they are paying an additional price for the near (and in some cases ...”

“... that is to say with most pleasant conversation and with philosophical problems. The events may seem familiar. The world they took place in is not. The Linceans were like children who surreptitiously lifted a corner of loose wallpaper and found another, more coherent pattern underneath. The parents ceased to be amused when they saw that they were ...”