“... 19th-century American history. From the mid-1830s to the outbreak of war in 1861, Freeman counts more than seventy violent incidents – duels, fistfights, stabbings – in the halls of Congress and the surrounding streets. Anticipating violence, she writes, congressmen regularly ‘strapped on knives and guns’ before heading to work. Many historians have ...”

“... some by old and close friends who knew him very much better than I did. My excuse for adding one more piece is that I would like to explain something of what he meant to younger historians who came within his orbit. Perhaps I shall end up speaking only for myself, but at any rate I can speak from experience as one of his pupils. The greatest of Alan ...”

“... and sometimes still is, miraculously cured, or a grotto where mothers can suck stalactites to get more milk, or a school where children once staged a rebellion of mass hysteria, having been possessed by the devil, screaming and dancing wildly for months on end, and no one dared stop them. Here is a history of people of whom no one has ever heard, and whom ...”

“... is a tricky subject to deal with. To argue that the Knight is not presented ironically we may need more evidence than the mere juxtaposition of two uses of a single word. Such evidence, however, is there in abundance, though Jones chooses to ignore it. The Knight is the first of the pilgrims to be described; he is the first to be offered the ‘cut’ by the ...”

“... above all needs to explain to himself. One might be able to write oneself into a new way of life, more amusing than the old: in this sense (which is Anita Brookner’s sense) writing is a penance for not being lucky in love but also a way of being livelier than life. Words also preserve memory ‘which would have vanished utterly had he not enclosed it in a ...”

“... but her father’s reputation, was not happy about the restriction: ‘I wish the World would take more care of itself and less of its neighbours. I should have been very safe, I trust, without such flights, & disturbances, & breaches.’ In Delphine, her long, sometimes exasperating and now curiously timely novel, de Staël, who had escaped Paris during the ...”

“... other remarkable versions of essentially the same tale: Kate Grenville’s The Secret River,2 Thomas Keneally’s The Commonwealth of Thieves3 and Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria.4 The mystery of the stolen continent. Naturally, Australian readers know in advance who did it – and in a sense are still doing it. Newcomers took the country from the previous ...”

“... nightmare: Englishness lost, identity cancelled, fatal infection,’ David Seabrook writes of Thomas De Quincey. Of himself, the dole-queue De Quincey, making a high-velocity, long-term progress through the Isle of Thanet. More speed, less haste: Seabrook is a master of the throwaway put-down, a speculator in tachist ...”

“... in the end. He could hamper, but not stop them. Ever since the launch of the Kipling rocket more than forty years earlier he had been far too famous for his letters to have been thrown away. At 24 he had not been six months in London before the Times had devoted a leader to his work. In that year, 1890, Henry James had termed him ‘the star of the ...”

“... rich provinces to economic ruin in the course of the 1340s, 1350s and 1360s. Italy offered even more enticing opportunities. Its wealth was an obvious magnet, and the rivalries of city republics and of local signori, and the territorial ambitions of the popes in their central Italian patrimony and of the Visconti of Milan in Lombardy, made sure that there ...”

“... have been widely touted by legalisation groups: Grinspoon and Bakalar seek to publicise its more specific therapeutic applications. One lies in cancer treatment. Among the worst side-effects of chemotherapy are severe vomiting and appetite loss; damaging consequences for morale often follow. Many patients have found that smoking a joint before ...”

“... fugitive lives. Some died of poverty or went to sea; some were transported to America or, more commonly, Australia. Others had moved to different parts of Britain. The custom of giving Africans garish or geo-specific names like Mungo, Pompey or Black London gradually died out and hundreds remain undetected in parish registers. In any case, after the ...”

“... by the small magazines, published by Eliot, anthologised by Yeats, and understood, alongside Dylan Thomas, to be one of the chief lyrical men of the age. Anaïs Nin, of all the spotters of seedy excellence, names him in her diaries as the sort of person who might put a pulse into a dull room: George Barker comes, with his dilated Celtic blue eyes, his ...”

“... in the extremity of this predicament, but Refn, a Danish director gone international, is more interested in violence for its own sickening sake. He is not alone. Drive won the best director award at Cannes in 2011 and Only God Forgives has already been named best film at the Sydney Film Festival. Like many artists keen on violence, Refn has a ...”

“... called ‘Les Auteurs de ma vie’. Earlier titles included works by Stefan Zweig on Tolstoy, Thomas Mann on Schopenhauer, Paul Valéry on Descartes, and contributions from living writers such as Marie-Hélène Lafon (on Flaubert) and Michel Schneider (on Pascal). The series was started in 2016, and the most recent book in the set, before ...”