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“... arms’. Repeatedly, he is described as ‘a perfect statue’; ‘satin smooth, cool as stone’; his flesh so cold and hard and ‘perfected’ – like the dead body in Sylvia Plath’s final poem, ‘Edge’ – that Bella has to wrap herself in an ‘old afghan’ before they can share the briefest snuggle. So here we have him, the perfect ...”

“... caused by Bremba’s ‘pet tiger’; her skin breaks out in weals at a touch. She loses two stone in weight. More voices take over, one of a little girl crying for her mummy; Alma’s body swells up in a fake pregnancy. She has erotic nightmares in which she is vampirised (puncture marks appear on her arms). Utterly dissociated from her body, she knows ...”

“... I have warned you against becoming’:Wash the white clothes on Monday and put them on the stone heap; wash the colour clothes on Tuesday and put them on the clothesline to dry; don’t walk barehead in the hot sun; cook pumpkin fritters in very hot sweet oil; soak your little cloths right after you take them off … This is how you sweep a yard; this ...”

“... to the margins’. There, pockets of Whig resistance no doubt remain – readers of Lawrence Stone’s correspondence with Russell in the TLS not so long ago might be surprised to learn the field had become so pacific. Yet even Stone has conceded the second part of the victory the revisionists claim. For he, too, has ...”

“... proposition that the body was nothing more than a complex system of measurable physical processes. Robert Koch’s Institute in Berlin was the epicentre for the bacteriological revolution – one pathogen, one disease and, we hope, one vaccine, one cure – which still dominates medical thinking. And so on. By the end of the 19th century the institutional ...”

“... that it was built by Africans and not some mysterious Semitic visitors.’ Since those stone ruins have an important role in the mythology of Mugabe’s African state, perhaps Selous deserves to have his name commemorated in a black capital for longer than the egregious Ewart Grogan, famous for travelling all the way from the Cape to Cairo in ...”

“... a matter of months before the Corbett-Ashley case by the psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Robert Stoller, who proposed the distinction in his 1968 study, Sex and Gender – the second volume was called The Transsexual Experiment. For Stoller, gender was identity, sex was genital pleasure, and humans would always give priority to the first (many ...”

“... like a scientific event looking at it in this way, like finding a large fragile fossil embedded in stone, or the mummified remains of a three-thousand-year-old man preserved in a bog, his prunish face flattened and smeared and warped, like a face pressed against a windowpane. I had once seen one of these men stretched out in a museum, and looking at him in his ...”

“... such good use of his work that they were obliged to copy it. Cultures do not disappear like soft stone eroded by tides: they interact with the visitor or invader cultures, as the Indian did with the British, and the Caucasian did with the Russian. Even when the empires which force these cultures on them collapse, the indigenous cultures continue to work on ...”

“... of craziness. He stood 6’ 4” tall; for the Johnson fight he weighed in at 105 kilos (over 16 stone) but was heavier when out of condition. In civvies he was insouciant, dandified, caddish-looking: a fur collar, a chapeau melon, his huge shoulders draped in an expensive-looking suit probably bought on credit. Fair-haired and square-jawed, in certain ...”

“... million from the Northern Bank in Belfast on 20 December, and on 30 January the murder of Robert McCartney in Magennis’s Bar. A few months ago it had seemed that the IRA might be on the brink of disbanding. One IRA source was quoted in Ireland’s Sunday Business Post: he said that he had been visited by a member of the IRA leadership, ‘and told ...”

“... scarce at different times. Thus a loaf of bread in its turn is, as the Gospel says, not like a stone. But at each stage in the process of distinction some sort of contrast of form and matter must be acknowledged. Those who would annexe all for form (or discourse, or ‘text’) are, as it were, constitutionally obliged to ignore the contrast. The drama of ...”

“... asked ‘whether a love of poverty helped’ him ‘use other eyes, like those of that sightless stone’. Whether he’s condemned here for not loving poverty – that is, for not being poor (as, in one account at least, Homer supposedly was) – or for wanting St Lucians to remain poor rather than grow wealthy from the tourists, is not made clear, and the ...”

“... scarcely survive a reading of Professor Jones’s excellent history; it would probably be killed stone dead by even a cursory glance at Russell Taylor’s Going for Broke, which is subtitled ‘How Banking Mismanagement in the Eighties Lost Thousands of Billions of Pounds’. Going for Broke occasionally exasperates because of its lack of organisation ...”

“... only other living French novelist I would compare with her as a source of intelligent pleasure, Robert Pinget.) She went about literature slowly once she had taken to it. Tropisms, her first book, was not published until 1939, seven years after she began writing it. It is a sparse but mordant collection of short scenes of social exchange whose ordinariness ...”