“... white slaves: they were the women the law deemed worth saving.When Detective Inspector Ernest Anderson brought Harvey into the Great Marlborough Street police station on 9 July 1910, it was clear that she was a promising victim, respectable enough to help bring the ‘ruffians’ to justice. She was young, Protestant, sexually inexperienced and softly ...”

“... puts it, ‘human rights inevitably became bound up with the power of the powerful.’ As Carol Anderson showed in Eyes off the Prize (2003) and Bourgeois Radicals (2014), the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (NAACP), helped by Du Bois, appealed in 1947 to the newly established UN to acknowledge African-Americans as victims of ...”

“... behaviour below. The star of that film, Keanu Reeves, also appears in The Matrix (1999) as Thomas Anderson, a.k.a. Neo, a company man turned hacker turned messiah. At the film’s conclusion, Neo phones in a proclamation of defiance from a booth on a busy street in the virtual world into which the bulk of the human species has been absorbed, before stepping ...”

“... and thereby denied them legal recognition of their gender. In 1986, female-to-male transsexual Mark Rees, in the first challenge to the ruling, lost his case at the European Court of Human Rights against the UK government for its non-recognition of his status as male, loss of privacy and barring his marriage to a woman. Only with the Gender Recognition Act ...”

“... otherness of insects, their fast-burn and utterly alien sense of time. The quotation from Enrique Anderson Imbert at the start of Eye of the Cricket clarifies the quest: ‘Then I felt within me the desperate rebelliousness of things that did not want to die, the thirst of mosses, the anxiety in the eyes of the cricket.’ Anxiety: that’s the tool with ...”

“... in Ireland, France and Russia, he did not give thought to the folk life of black Americans,’ Mark Helbling argued in an essay in Phylon (1979). ‘This was a striking omission, one that Alain Locke was quick to correct.’By and large the writers of the Harlem Renaissance did not experiment in the manner of Pound, Eliot and Stevens; in their use of the ...”

“... old standards on the Gilpin Place piano, with occasional updates, ‘Forgotten Dreams’ by Leroy Anderson, the theme from Limelight, which I give her a few years or so before she dies.But it isn’t death that puts paid to these musical evenings, though when Aunt Eveline dies we inherit her piano and take it home. What takes its place in the smoky ...”

“... ploughed field. Perhaps because of her background in dance – she has written a wonderful book on Mark Morris and edited an unexpurgated version of Nijinsky’s diaries* – Acocella locates herself, figuratively speaking, at a kind of middle distance from her subjects: as if she were watching them from a well-placed seat (perhaps thirty or forty feet ...”

“... films – seven of them, by my count, anybody else’s masterpiece – and created, with Mark Frost, the show that ‘changed TV for ever’, Twin Peaks. At least to begin with, he took anyone who met him by surprise. Mel Brooks, who produced his second film, The Elephant Man (1980), ‘expected to meet a grotesque, a fat little German with fat ...”

“... In such a violent play, though, I find myself spiked by my literalness (as I remember being by Mark Ravenhill’s Shopping and Fucking). If a character is mutilated on stage, blinded, say, or anally raped or has his or her feet eaten off by rats, the pain of this (I nearly wrote the discomfort) must transcend anything else that happens on the stage. A ...”

“... that ‘the heroine is also the narrator, yet has no idea what is going on’ seems wide of the mark. The novel is both funny and terrifying precisely because of the suspicion that Aroon knows exactly what is going on and that the only way to survive is to behave as though she doesn’t. She’s an embodiment of the link between ingénue and ingenuity. Hers ...”

“... to attend Régis Debray’s trial in Camiri as part of an effort to save his life. All this left a mark. But it was at the Berlin congress organised in January 1968 by the SDS, the left-wing German students, that I began to feel the need to join some organisation. Rudi Dutschke was there, the Wolf brothers with Ulrike Meinhof skulking in the background and ...”

“... like the dramatis personae of some great 1990s satirical novel: U2, Björk, Elvis Costello, Laurie Anderson, Tony Blair at the Q Awards. There’s a running gag about Angus Deayton popping up anywhere Eno goes. In one episode, Eno orders a specialist porno tape from America, but is frustrated when it gets stuck in his VHS; he ends up having to take the entire ...”

“... emerging climate crisis was a problem that could not be solved by market forces. In 1992, Perry Anderson wrote that there was a new opportunity for ‘the classical arguments of socialism for intentional democratic control’. If there must be ‘an environmental revolution comparable in significance only to the industrial and agricultural ...”

“... an executive vice president at UnitedHealth, one of America’s largest private health companies. Mark Britnell, a career NHS manager who rose to become one of the most powerful civil servants in the department, upped sticks in 2009 to become global head of health for the consultants KPMG. This last move did have the advantage of giving an insight into what ...”