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“... White Duke’. This dubious pseudonymous character was first aired in an interview with Rolling Stone’s bumptious but canny young reporter Cameron Crowe; it soon became notorious. Crowe’s scene-setting picture of Bowie at home featured black candles and doodled ballpoint stars meant to ward off evil influences. Bowie revealed an enthusiasm for Aleister ...”

“... Another drawing was done with a nurse’s blue pencil on the flyleaf of a volume of The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson.‘These drawings were presented to me by a very ill man,’ the catalogue entry read, quoting Edward Adamson, the art therapist who first encountered J.J. Beegan in 1946. By the time they met, Adamson explained, Beegan ‘had been in a ...”

“... wide-boned and five foot nine by the time she was a teenager; but she also weighed six or seven stone by the time she was eight, and was soon ‘obese’. Her childhood nicknames included Fatty and Tubs and Fat Angie and Chubster. She became, Gordon writes, ‘almost wholly dependent’ on her mother ‘for reassurance and affection’ because she didn’t ...”

“... which for their combination of learning and penetration excel even those of his master, Ernst Robert Curtius – there is nothing said which he was not equally ready to say, mutatis mutandis, about Montale. He studied the poetry of the past on the assumption that in the present there could be great poets too. For Contini history is now and now is ...”

“... to fair eyes and brown hair by the 40th page. I lost track of the plot. Someone killed stone-dead early on by a lorry would turn up alive on page 100. The chaotic story was only brought to order when, in the end, everybody died. It was a vainglorious mishmash of Dostoevsky, Lawrence and Huxley – to name but a few. With the temerity of youthful ...”

“... of Evesham, who were not displeased to acquire an apparently inexhaustible supply of good building stone. The 35 monks put down from their seats in the abbey choir were assured of a pension from the bureaucracy set up by Henry VIII and his details man and fixer, Thomas Cromwell. Abbot Hawford’s career was not over; he died seventeen years later as dean of ...”

“... victims of Western standards of humanity.’ Editing the piece for the New York Review of Books, Robert Silvers objected to the unqualified critique of Western capitalism: ‘Won’t you keep in mind the Western reader who might not want to cross the slag heaps with you?’ (She felt he had edited the piece into a ‘mild, unchallenging plea’.) With its ...”

“... judges, a backbench MP called Malcolm Craig, shows no overlap with either Hermione Lee (2006) or Robert Macfarlane (2013). The Elysian judges for 2013 are Jo Cross, a columnist whose criterion for imaginative literature is its ‘relevance’; Penny Feathers, retired from the Foreign Office and attempting to write topical thrillers; Tobias Benedict, an ...”

“... and correspondence with his publisher, François Maspero. As the editors, Jean Khalfa and Robert Young, note, this body of writing – unfinished, restless, often agonised – reflects Fanon’s search for ‘freedom as dis-alienation’, itself a response to his experience of what Sartre called ‘extreme situations’: the battlefields of the Second ...”

“... become so totally “unhinged” when it comes to your favourite President, me. These people are stone cold crazy!’ It is unclear what exactly prompted this. He also tweets his new campaign slogan, ‘Transition to Greatness’, which presumably does not refer to the transgender community.California announces that it will send mail-in ballots to all voters ...”

“... cooks, cleaners, sailors and security operatives.Knowles’s book acted on me like a goad, a stone in the shoe. I had the notion that somewhere behind and beyond the sharp-eyed sociological expeditions she undertakes was a General Theory of Everything. A resolution of that terrible inundation coming from all sides at once: our ultimate ...”

“... endowed them. Before long Gay’s scrupulous historical habits began to spread, and by 1979, when Robert Darnton investigated the relationship between the Encyclopédie and the book trade in The Business of Enlightenment, it was clear that the study of 18th-century thought was changing out of recognition. From now on it would belong to professional historians ...”

“... At the end of a path lined with cypress trees a rectangle of clipped lawn is enclosed by low grey stone walls. Some 356 British soldiers and airmen of the First World War are buried here, the graves set in rows, softened by evergreen shrubs, floribunda roses and photinia trees. The headstones are engraved with regimental badges, names, ranks and dates. The ...”

“... from when a ‘cobble’ was thrown through the window of a closed carriage; in reality, the stone came over the wall of Bedford’s father’s Schloss. ‘And for goodness’ sake don’t let’s make too much of that absurd episode – it was no flight to Varennes. My grandfather, your great-grandfather that is, faced the Luddites … Oh my poor little ...”

“... who sat bolt upright in her bed, oblivious to the surrounding tumult, as silent and unmoving as a stone deity. Obviously, I thought, we have strayed into the wrong ward, much as Elizabeth Taylor did in the film of Suddenly Last Summer. Mam was not ill like this. She had nothing to do with the distracted creature who sat by the nearest bed, her gown hitched ...”