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“... One might, in view of these transformations, be tempted to regard The Religion of Java as one of Mark Twain’s classics, that ‘everyone wants to have read and nobody wants to read’. But, aside from being Geertz’s finest work, it continues to hold its audience. The question is why. In Works and Lives (1987), a sympathetic study of the grip that ...”

“... being batted by the assembled Western Governments that have befriended it. Turkey, freshly off the mark for entry into the EU, does not, unlike Iraq, even tolerate the language of its Kurds – and, as a member of Nato in good standing, likewise jails and tortures without hindrance. As for ‘international justice’, the farce of the Hague Tribunal on ...”

“... Wake, and what with one thing and another I’ve sometimes felt the same way, on behalf of Mark Frost and David Lynch, about the news environment that accompanied the broadcast of Twin Peaks: The Return. I say ‘on behalf of’ because I imagine that Lynch couldn’t care less. ‘It’s good to kind of go along with your life,’ he told ...”

“... face with muffins and Coca-Cola’ in the café next door to her expensive school. Only two things mark out Valentine from the other rich, pretty, sad girls in the café by the crammer. She has no internet presence at all, no Facebook or Instagram, no nothing, and when Lucie plants a doctored phone on her she never switches it on. And then, in the Metro one ...”

“... to work in the hotel industry, with the help of what they believe is an employment agency called Anderson Price Associates. ‘They weren’t stupid,’ we’re assured, ‘they knew about trafficking, about people who tricked girls into thinking they were going to good jobs, proper jobs, who then ended up drugged, trapped in some filthy hole of a room ...”

“... story, which chronicles the showbiz mores of a bewildering galaxy of cartoon characters – Silver Anderson, Mannon Cable, Jack Python, Jade Johnson, Whitney Valentine – lurks an italicised sub-plot. This tells of an unnamed victim of sexual abuse who falls into the quite plausible routine of torching her abusers to a charred crisp in their own homes. When ...”

“... Zachary Post is suspected of murder, but an e-mail puts him in the clear. Post is angry when Mark Larkin, the new boy in the office, is promoted ahead of him; Larkin becomes an editor and is ruthless with Post’s copy, filling it with ‘second-tier magazine-speak words’: ‘Grand Guignol’, ‘cause célèbre’, ‘roué’, ‘moue’ and ...”

“... Bill Berkson in 1971 enjoying congress with another comic character called Henry (created by Carl Anderson in 1932) in a pretty comprehensive range of sexual positions. As in his pseudo-Christian assemblages, his many collages which make liberal use of male pornography and the more explicit bits of I Remember, Brainard manages to fuse the innocent and the ...”

“... pop!/Re-bop!/Mop!// Y-e-a-h!’ It’s crowded with names (Dizzy Gillespie, Sammy Davis, Marian Anderson, Paul Robeson), with flashing neon (WONDER BAR, CASBAH, SHALIMAR), with headlines, snatches of speech, children’s rhymes, lists of goods for sale (‘Groceries/Suits/Fruits/Watches/Diamond rings/THE DAILY NEWS’), with ...”

“... was ‘agony for me’ when Larry ‘thinks I’m no good’. Such a public breakdown might well mark the end of an actor’s career, but while Redgrave never quite recovered the shine of his glory days, he continued to work. In 1965 he directed and acted in Turgenev’s A Month in the Country in Guildford opposite Ingrid Bergman. Reviews were not ...”

“... they partially paid for – at the McManus Gallery in Dundee. Being painted by Moffat has become a mark of entry into Scotland’s intellectual pantheon, formalising Nairn’s place alongside figures like Hugh MacDiarmid, Muriel Spark and Ascherson himself. Ascherson is keen that this process of national canonisation should not become one of pacification and ...”

“... Corbin Henderson of Poetry; to Scofield Thayer and James Sibley Watson of the Dial; to Margaret Anderson of the Little Review. Two hefty books collected his courtship letters to Dorothy Shakespear, and those written to her some thirty years later from the Disciplinary Training Centre outside Pisa, where he was incarcerated after surrendering to US forces in ...”

“... up with offensive rhyming chants) broke the most precious record in American sports, Babe Ruth’s mark of 60 home runs in a single season, which had stood for 34 years. When Maris struck number 61 in the final game of the 1961 season, no one seemed especially pleased: not the Yankee fans, who resented his stealing the Babe’s thunder; not the New York ...”

“... the orderly world of kings and queens and emperors and empresses falls on their narrow shoulders. Mark Steinberg and Vladimir Khrustalev’s Fall of the Romanovs is a collection of documents from the very end of the tsarist period which tells the story of Nicholas’s last days. Robert Massie’s The Romanovs: The Final Chapter tells what happened to the ...”

“... that status? Can we, in short, really see duelling as a by-product of aristocratic dominance, as a mark of caste? Victor Kiernan’s answer in this intriguing and invariably well-written book is an emphatic and unsurprising yes. Kiernan is both a Marxist and a student of Antonio Gramsci. Like the majority of British historians who take even a remotely radical ...”