“... made him swerve. Because I do see birds. There’s a kite comes sometimes, cruel-looking thing. He may have been looking at that.He was in his leathers, only at the inquest the police said his trousers were open.That doesn’t sound like Clifford.Some strange flowers there today. Not mine. Nice, I suppose.I’ve​ got myself an orange jacket. Hi-Vis, they ...”

“... was closely associated with the administration of the colonies. However intellectually rarefied it may have been, ethnology – as it was usually known – often amounted to an exercise in gathering information about the empire’s subjects. Who was ruled? How did they live? What did they think? What languages did they speak? It didn’t help that the ...”

“... takes pains to ensure that its interests are never endangered by such high-mindedness. Merkel may like to warn against the dangers posed by populists such as Marine Le Pen, but meanwhile her party cosies up to far-right authoritarians like Viktor Orbán, who allow German factories in Hungary to operate with what one observer called ‘Chinese ...”

“... centre and at its furthest edges where the armies fought, less so in the regions in between. Some may find Gargola’s overall picture overdetermined, but he is broadly persuasive in finding a deep psychosocial basis for what looks like a pragmatic Roman approach to space, and also in locating it in very old ritual practices. One thing he largely ...”

“... mine, he is ours, and therefore I must be, in that sense, a god in this; where he is concerned I may decide what is best. And I believe this has done me good. I remember him. Again.’ The encounters between Willie and his father are some of the most affecting scenes in the novel. But they also set the stage for the book’s central conundrum. Contemplating ...”

“... be ashamed to be connected with a man who used his great gifts to obscure the truth.’ Huxley may never have uttered these words, but they have become legendary, and they rankle with A.N. Wilson, whose new book is designed to cut Darwin down to size and discredit ‘Darwin-worshippers’ and their ‘new religion’. Wilson is impressed by Wilberforce’s ...”

“... rain down on the city and corrode the skin of everyone underneath so they feel how you feel, then may I suggest Courtney Love?You can forgive an 18-year-old meeting her idol some overwriting – though I sort of love the bone, the blood clots, the acid and the blistering skin – but what would become Moran’s characteristic stance is here: she’s speaking ...”

“... Martin Amis novel done in historical retrospect, displaying a pained awareness that social change may not have felt like pure liberation to each and every woman one pursued in the 1970s (‘I ponced off the tenets of the Sexual Revolution,’ Amis writes, ‘meaning I applied peer pressure and propagandised about the earthy wisdom of the herd’), along with ...”

“... with Bordes when he wrote that ‘modern individualistic music, with its realism and emotionalism, may stir human feeling, but it can never create that atmosphere of serene spiritual ecstasy that the old music generates. It is a case of mysticism versus hysteria.’ Victoria’s Requiem was approved for use in the liturgy in a listing of 1904, though it ...”

“... don’t start working seriously on their close control by the time they’re nine or ten, they may never catch up.) This means that basketball players sometimes get normal childhoods, and can emerge suddenly into stardom from relatively ordinary backgrounds – a possibility strengthened by the fact that the NBA recruits its talent not from specialised ...”

“... trapped colonised peoples in relations of dependency. Smiles was impatient with structures. ‘It may be of comparatively little consequence how a man is governed from without,’ he wrote, because ‘everything depends upon how he governs himself from within.’ The nation, for example, was ‘only an aggregate of individual conditions’. And ‘no ...”

“... subject to instruction: keep the tone of your letters happy, they were told, however unhappy you may be. Write about day-to-day matters and be sure to tell the men about the outpouring of support for the troops at home. ‘Girls,’ one agony aunt wrote, ‘your most important job is to keep up Bill’s ego and his morale.’ In the face of the dehumanising ...”

“... of delimitation, turned the song of others (which might be very bad) into an artwork.’Banalities may be degraded – they are made to be circulated and consumed – but in that process they are also rendered common. They indicate a buried kind of cultural commons (the ‘ban’ in ‘banal’ points to the common as that which is often denigrated), which can ...”

“... of among other things ‘psychogeography’, were a moving force behind the événements of May 1968, while in England the earth mysteries movement reawoke interest in ley lines, causing considerable annoyance to the Ministry of Works with its activities at Stonehenge. Graham Robb’s archaeo-psycho-geographical-antiquarian bicycle tour of France has ...”

“... in her last years. Far more grievous was the fall from grace of her only son. Arnold (the name may not have been propitious) was the hope of the family: a gifted, athletic boy, he was to be the shining vindication of all she had worked for. Nothing went right. He failed to gain a fellowship at Oxford, he couldn’t win the heart of the woman he loved, he ...”