“... recalls (and refers to) a certain lineage of quasi-mystical British art that owes much of its power to never quite spelling things out. My own list would include Powell and Pressburger, Nic Roeg, Paul Nash, Derek Jarman, Anna Kavan, as well as under-celebrated British surrealist painters like Ithell Colquhoun and Emmy Bridgwater. This art revels in the ...”

“... flesh, cast the bones into a stream on St Mark’s Night – the bone that floats will give you power over anyone you choose, tinker or duke. Magic, like poaching, was a way of disrupting the social order. The emphasis of most poaching books (the non-fiction ones at any rate) is on technique: the finer points of ...”

“... for the transformation of English bodies is largely medical. But in England, this transformative power was also understood in theatrical terms. In his bizarre treatise The Unloveliness of Lovelocks (1628), an extended jeremiad against the fashion for men to wear their hair long, the radical Protestant William Prynne bemoaned what we might now think of as the ...”

“... paragraphs), it betrays Sebald’s lugubrious influence. It’s as if he – or Proust, Musil or Henry James – were being deployed to speak the mind of a privileged but unworldly young man in the 21st century.In his teens Arudpragasam read philosophy rather than fiction and later studied philosophy for his PhD. That, too, has left a mark. The meditative ...”

“... varied as he attempted to take the moral temperature of the whole country, charting the corrupting power of crude commercialism. In effect, Tono-Bungay is his Howards End, another nearly contemporary novel that comes over all Condition-of-Englandy, with a house doing the symbolic heavy lifting. But even this impressive book, it must be said, has its ...”

“... emptying his latrine, a personal ritual whose loud stink interfered with the parp of official power. So much for marching, displays, parades.) Each sentence, chapter, book, is a sack being held open – not for the stray cat, though that as well, but for the familiar, the slogan, the reiterated, the distinctive, the mantric. The books form ...”

“... 1793 is the postulate for an elaborate paradigm that is supposed to explain China’s decline in power in the 19th century. In this paradigm, empires based in China had for millennia seen themselves as being at the centre of a ‘Chinese world order’. They adhered inflexibly to debasing rituals, such as prostration and beating the head on the ground, to ...”

“... Neuropathy, Urban Cowboy’s Rhabdomyolysis’. Language is an essential tool for limiting the power of illness over our minds, which is partly why patients sometimes seem as happy to know the name of their disease as to be offered a cure. Attempting to convey the horrors of physical suffering in words, we are caught up in the ‘cool web of language which ...”

“... Hereditarily-retarded people who looked normal – labelled ‘morons’ by psychologist Henry Goddard – were feared to be swamping the population, and needed to be identified. Instead of using cranial or physiognomic indicators like Lombroso and Broca, Goddard and the Americans put their faith in the new technology of intelligence tests. When many ...”

“... So shall the voices of dissent – the voices which, as the work of both writers shows, have the power to tear even a single head apart – be allowed their space. This view of writing has more affinity with early 20th-century Modernism – with North American imagism in particular – and with the international avant-garde, than it has with most ...”

“... a frequently articulated theme of the period. ‘We wish to be a twofold thing,’ wrote Arthur Henry Hallam, ‘And keep our present self to watch within!’ In his Preface to his Poems of 1853 Matthew Arnold famously located the beginning of modernity in ‘the dialogue of the mind with itself’. Though Armstrong does not wish to restrict her focus to ...”

“... so desperately needed, both to finance his pioneer expedition and to give him the administrative power and licence he required. Delicate negotiations ensued between the British South Africa Company, as Rhodes called his new venture, and the British Government in the form of the Colonial Office. Rhodes lied constantly throughout. He assured the Colonial ...”

“... man or a woman, you will hear these dialogues differently. Nevertheless, the balance of narrative power in Present Times is by no means evenly distributed. Attercliffe is the only character present in every scene of the book and the only character privileged to observe and reflect upon his surroundings. Apparently, this gives him a major advantage in the ...”

“... produced a revolutionary, patriotic and anti-Habsburg stir in Prague. The vulgar nationalism of Henry the Fowler’s address in Lohengrin with its demand for a war against the Slavic East, the only explicitly nationalist political piece in Wagner’s musical work, arose out of the ferment preceding 1848. Wagner wrote in the revolutionary year a poem very ...”

“... seriously devalued.’ Ten years ahead of events: ‘in Germany, all it would take for a shift of power from the hands of the Socialists to the Christian Democrats would be for the Liberal Party to change camps.’ ‘Writing, like any act, does not forgive.’ In a television debate with Giscard: ‘he looked at me in utter astonishment, shook his head in ...”