“... him get behind phallocentricism to a theoretical realm in which language and desire compose the white noise of libidinised thought. In consequence, his criticism has more purchase than that familiar Freudian writing which, revisionary in a naive sense, reinscribes the theory. When Terry Eagleton, for instance, in his erratic and self-regarding ...”

“... against the dark knights of the state. The difference between Kafka’s view of the state, or William Burroughs’ or even George Orwell’s, and that of James Kelman, is that Kelman believes his fiction offers a more or less literal depiction of how the state operates – it’s not a surreal thing or a symbolic thing or a thing in the mind, for him ...”

“... revenues to create a new Palladian-style Government House in Calcutta, and a college at Fort William where members of the master race could be trained in colonial administration free from contact with any men and women who were not white. Bayly’s interpretation of British imperialism in this period, then, is a stark ...”

“... beneath the rifles which threaten them; or else it is a delightful young girl all in snowy white who dreams in the moonlight leaning on a broken column. I mean to say that most people see in a canvas only a subject which takes them by the throat or by the heart and they demand nothing further of the artist than a smile or a tear.’ According to Jane ...”

“... doesn’t succeed. UN forces then face the dilemma of deterrence: sending lightly armed troops in white vehicles under a tight mandate into an ongoing war is asking for trouble – as the history of the Blue Helmets in South Lebanon amply demonstrates. An honourable tradition argues that humanitarian intervention should be illegal – but can occasionally be ...”

“... Kinglake just sat there, not understanding the dialogue. ‘I was only the death’s head and white sheet with which he scared the enemy,’ Kinglake smiles, ‘I think that I played this spectral part exceedingly well.’ Dthemetri advised Kinglake to kill a guide who led them to the wrong bank of the Jordan. ‘There was something fascinating in this ...”

“... a working-class audience. And there are two rather slighter essays on Trollope as a traveller and William Morris as a Victorian. But the two best pieces are on George Eliot and Charlotte Brontë. In a study of Middlemarch, Briggs shows how Lydgate’s success as a doctor and failure as a medical reformer can only be understood with reference to the ...”

“... when she first saw him on holiday in Milan in 1957. ‘Dressed in immaculately pressed jeans, white shirt, a blue V-neck pullover and a Jaeger slimline bow tie ... he represented everything that the English students ... knew they were not.’ It was not just a matter of appearance. Although formal education failed him – he found his identity in a gang ...”

“... And ten to wan the piper is a Cockney. By 1931 he was already proclaiming, in a letter to William Soutar, that he was not the man to write ‘bairn rhymes or re-popularise Scots’, though he still thought ‘re-vaccination of the children with it’ an excellent idea. Some difficult years – in personal matters – and a change of orientation in ...”

“... Russells. His uncle Rollo began to lose his sight and had to leave the Foreign Office, his uncle William went mad and was consigned to an asylum where he spent the rest of his long life, and his father had an epileptic seizure. In the winter of 1873-4, his parents and his older brother Frank went to Italy. When they came back, Frank had diphtheria; though he ...”

“... like fish and rutted like goats. Once, at the New Yorker, Joseph Mitchell came across Katharine White and Sayre’s mother, Gertrude Lynahan Sayre, snickering over a passage from Edmund Wilson’s Memoirs of Hecate County (1946) in which the narrator referred to his penis as a ‘club’. ‘His club!’ one of them exclaimed. ‘Bunny’s club,’ said the ...”

“... north of the Trent and in Calais, then clipping his wings. Warwick learned to tolerate the bluff William Hastings, a Leicestershire squire whom Edward made his principal fixer and chief pimp, but was then blindsided by the king’s clandestine marriage to the widowed commoner Elizabeth Woodville, after which Warwick and the Nevilles were frozen out at ...”

“... she finds, were met over and over again with an excessive response. From the execution of George William Gordon, a member of the Jamaican National Assembly, for allegedly inciting the 1865 rebellion at Morant Bay, to the conviction for conspiracy of the Meerut defendants in India in 1933 for organising a railway strike, the dynamic of rebellion and ...”

“... was formerly the greatest coal town in the country. Now the country is ploughland, interspersed by white gravefields containing the remains, among thousands of others, of my great-uncle Frank and Kipling’s son Jack, though who can be sure exactly where they lie? (The identification of Jack’s grave in the cemetery at St Mary’s Advanced Dressing Station is ...”

“... Europe. In one demonstration at the Royal Institution in February 1892 he spelled out the name of William Thomson, Lord Kelvin, in electric light and made glass vacuum tubes glow as if by magic. Lord Rayleigh, who was to share a Nobel Prize for the discovery of argon, saw in Tesla ‘the genius of a discoverer’, but others weren’t so ...”