“... political form. Sade, we know, mostly wrote his wank-manuals while in prison during the French Revolution. He was a man of specialised and unpleasant sexual interests, but he was also a radical political theorist, with much to teach about the dialectics of sex and power, for those who dared to learn. In Justine, we can read an allegory about the ...”

“... point I learned that Solaris hadn’t been translated directly into English, but from a Polish-to-French translation, with a result Lem described as ‘drastic’ – a beautiful irony for a book that takes as its subject the impossibility of meaningful contact between alien species. Perhaps I should wonder: had I read Lem at all?Anyhow, Lem was ...”

“... as Gilroy says, shepherding the development of Black Arts charities and the building of David Adjaye’s Rivington Place, the first permanent public space in England ‘dedicated to diversity in the visual arts’. But he was horrified, too, by the way cultural studies as an academic discipline had developed, especially in the US. It had ...”

“... out a substantial and authoritative History of Irish Women’s Poetry, edited by Ailbhe Darcy and David Wheatley. A new genealogy of Irish poetry that doesn’t foreground Yeats or Kavanagh but Katharine Tynan and Máire Mhac an tSaoi has come into view.Deane reacted promptly to protests about The Field Day Anthology by commissioning two volumes of women’s ...”

“... for the fourth time in its brief history, to prevent the resignation of the first minister, David Trimble. Just over a year later, on 26 November 2003, the much postponed Assembly election took place, with the DUP and Sinn Féin emerging as the largest parties, gaining ground from moderate unionists and nationalists. A review of the working of the Good ...”

“... in a British Empire’, as well as against fears of Catholic re-expansion in Europe and the French ‘universal monarchy’. The individuals who counted could all too easily perceive their own advantage as identified with the national interest. Saving one’s estate from creditors coincided happily with the good of Scotland. In Parliamentary ...”

“... selection of speakers, who ranged from Patrick Heron to Victor Burgin, Mary Kelly to Robyn Denny, David Hockney to Rasheed Araeen. The highlights included Lisa Tickner’s brilliant dismemberment of Reg Butler’s defence of his question: ‘Can a woman become a vital creative artist without ceasing to be a woman except for purposes of census?’ Peter ...”

“... all the seamarks and buoys. He would have to hold out of Calais as well as he could: at least the French were friendly, and they had begun sending him supplies. On the morning of Sunday, 7 August, Effingham’s council of war decided on breaking up the Spanish formation with fireships. By midnight they were ready, eight private ships packed with inflammable ...”

“... The most notable New York venues in that era were probably the Sanctuary and the Loft, home to DJ David Mancuso. Saturday Night For Ever includes some enthusiastic reminiscences of the gay scene in London: the drugs, the songs and the very late nights. The camp, glam impulses behind the upsurge in gay clubbing influenced the image of disco in the ...”

“... Tate) and Lady Catherine (1804, Edinburgh, National Gallery of Scotland); William Turner and Sir David Brewster (inventor of the kaleidoscope) were frequent guests; on his solitary rides in the Lakes he often called on De Quincey (then editor of the Westmorland Gazette), and visited William Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy, whom Andrew describes in a letter ...”

“... more self-conscious about his methods: when he started his grand tour, he contemplated writing in French, and on other occasions he debated whether to use the past or the present tense. By comparison Pepys’s linguistic aberrations have an innocent air. It has been pointed out by David Nokes that the Companion is ...”

“... years (our present), vanishing into the Cévennes in the company of his long-lost (illegitimate) French granddaughter. Theo Wuttke’s destiny is promising in the same way as the destiny of those characters in Balzac who lived through the Revolution and the Napoleonic era, the Restoration and the July Monarchy, is promising: their lifelines serve as Geiger ...”

“... an undeclared nuclear weapons programme. The team was led by an aggressive IAEA inspector called David Kay, though it was not really an IAEA operation but a US one: the deputy chief inspector, the American diplomat Bob Gallucci, called most of the shots. ‘The team,’ Gallucci said in 2001, ‘was very, very special … we had a lot of team members with ...”

“... Kazuo Ishiguro, British in all but name, has not lived in Nagasaki since he was a toddler; David Mitchell left Hiroshima four years ago. There is a certain amount of unjustly neglected travel writing, such as the work of the late Alan Booth. But Japan has never attracted the attention of a Chatwin or a Naipaul, let alone fostered a Kipling, a Somerset ...”

“... to life, liberty and property’. In Article 17 of the Declaration of the Rights of Man, the French National Assembly asserted that ‘Property is an inviolable and sacred right.’ But these formulations were no sooner enounced than erased, to be replaced by the more inclusive goals of ‘happiness’ and ‘fraternity’, not to mention ...”