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“... with the authority of those who know what the moral order allows and what it forbids . . . Donna Anna and her supporters seem to be making the right judgments (or so one might propose). In other words, they may lack directive authority, but they suppose themselves to have a form of epistemic or cognitive authority. And so on at length. That’s all to ...”

“... chose to expose the truth, let it fall where it might. They ranged from Bertha Pappenheim (the ‘Anna O’ of the Freud-Breuer casebook, whose multiple life surely deserves a comprehensive biography) to less celebrated inquirers, social workers and publicists. But they were too close to the traffic to pull its roots up and disentangle them. Even Bristow is ...”

“... Such a sense of the value of the incarnate, the great worth of mundane life in the flesh, informs Anna Laetitia Barbauld’s ‘To a Little Invisible Being who is Expected Soon to Become Visible’. The speaker, the expectant mother, calls upon the baby in her womb: ‘Haste, infant bud of being, haste to blow.’ The mother will gladly endure ‘nature’s ...”

“... Tom Doniphon (John Wayne), who stands up to Valance but feels bad for other reasons, and who burns his own house down when the drink overtakes him. Rance comes into this lawless town with his law books in his bag: he is looking to be an attorney one day, but seeing as he’s detained in Shinbone, he takes a job, falls in love, and sets about trying to ...”

“... Skunk’. Sometimes the same poems appear in different versions, notably in the case of Burns, whose ‘Gin a body fuck a body/Need a body cry?’ is inferior to the better-known version of ‘Coming through the Rye’ printed in Fuller, but whose ‘John Anderson My Jo’ is shown to longer and better effect by Whitworth. Even Fuller himself spans ...”

“... problem, as the war had shown, was crucial. Battle of Britain pilots, suffering from third-degree burns, had in some cases lost so much skin that there was no alternative but to transplant skin from a ‘foreigner’, a process that gave only temporary relief: the foreign tissue always ended by being rejected. I stumbled to my feet and as best I could ...”

“... by essays on authors once widely read outside the academy – Wordsworth, Coleridge, Blake, Burns, Lamb and Southey – in which Johnston asks what effect Pitt’s alarm had on the development of English literature, particularly on ‘that great body of work we call Romantic. It was not good for it, evidently, but just how bad was it?’ The longer the ...”

“... when she saw Louis XVI being taken to his trial. This suspicion of tears in high places still burns hot and strong. After George Osborne wept at the funeral of Margaret Thatcher, he was cross-questioned at some length on the Today programme by John Humphrys, who, as Dixon points out, seemed unable to credit that a grown man could genuinely grieve for his ...”

“... two lovers exchanging ‘hands legs and fates’ in the winter time in the Revolution. The candle burns when Zhivago writes his poems, the emblem and essence of what lives and matters. Lara is presumably in bed and asleep. Put like that, it sounds a piece of bathos and this is the paradox of an art like Pasternak’s, which is at once totally popular and ...”

“... the FBI, William Flynn, edited a popular crime magazine, Flynn’s Weekly. His successor, William Burns, was a national celebrity and the subject of countless feature articles. Like Flynn, Burns was an affable, extrovert Irish cop – a major figure in New York night-life as well as a popular lecturer, and the author of two ...”

“... Highland fling: it springs from the same nationalistic feeling that makes him write rhapsodies for Burns and Iona, attack the map-makers for having Anglicised Gaelic place-names, and lament that farms have declined to the point where they are run by tractors and women – ‘the wife hersel was loupan roun in breeks.’ But Neill is not simply a crusty ...”

“... serialised by Beaverbrook in the Sunday Express, before complete decrepitude set in. Born while Anna Karenina was being serialised, he died – on 15 December 1965 – while the Beatles were promoting Rubber Soul. A month earlier, Ken Tynan had said ‘fuck’ on TV. Maugham, by most accounts, had been saying it in public quite a lot as well. Meyers clearly ...”

“... repugnant offenders – ‘even the worst Aryan Nation thugs’, Biskind writes, ‘one of whom burns a swastika into the butt of another with the red-hot tip of a lit cigarette’. It was a series the networks would never have made. Chris Albrecht, head of original programming at HBO, hired Tom Fontana to write and run the show. Fontana told Biskind that ...”

“... once again a nuisance, the road sweepers and Uber drivers whose cases we take up when their house burns to the ground. We want answers, but we don’t want to look for them in ourselves, so we look to cardboard cut-outs, to a few stage villains from the old order, whose guilt is ‘clear’.A bomb goes off in a football stadium or on a tube train, a building ...”