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“... with John Tagg in Peter’s remarks on Althusserian splinter groups, ‘many of which question Saint Louis Althusser’s total banishment of the human subject. Even the most psychotic amongst us sometimes gets that hint that we exist as a limited, physical organism, subject to birth, bodily existence and death.’ Looking back, I think that Peter’s ...”

“... Black Jacobins, C.L.R. James successfully revived interest in the slaves and free blacks active in Saint-Domingue’s revolution in 1791. Arguing that liberty, equality and fraternity meant even more to the enslaved in France’s richest Caribbean colony than to the inhabitants of Paris, James didn’t so much decentre the French Revolution as locate its ...”

“... Tomalin. In his chapter on James Joyce Hamilton dwells exclusively on the author’s ‘patron saint’, Harriet Weaver. Surprisingly – for a study whose main concern is the suppression or revelation of intimate materials – he does not discuss the Stanislaus Joyce-Richard Ellmann connection which has ‘authoritatively’ warped posterity’s ...”

“... Andrew Miller’s first two novels, Ingenious Pain (1997) and Casanova (1998), were extended fantasies set in an imaginatively embellished 18th century. In his third novel, Oxygen (2001), Miller cast off the breeches and capes to write about a mother suffering from terminal cancer whose sons go to her house in the country to help nurse her ...”

“... find work to support the family. Emilio died in 2011 aged 101. When I told a friend, the writer Andrew Greig, that I was writing this piece, he told me that his father, born in 1899, came down with Spanish flu while on leave from the war in France. ‘His convalescence delayed his return to the front, where his battalion was all but wiped out,’ ...”

“... from a tragic missed opportunity for Calvin Klein, is Mahler’s strength. He was not the sickly saint of popular myth: he was an athletic, aggressive man, undeserving of pity. Mahler’s rise to the top – both as conductor and as composer – was fast and furious. He liked to say that he was an exile three times over – as a Bohemian in Austria, as an ...”

“... as love in a Cold War climate. The earlier part involved Brittany, a large family house at Saint-Briac, and Berlin, where his father served as US Attorney. Kerry was the cosmopolitan, French-speaking child of high-hoping Americans, and he still gives the impression of being someone who has spent too many hours doing prep. At St Paul’s School in ...”

“... singled out for praise by critics as diverse as Philip Toynbee, Francis King, Angus Wilson and Andrew Sinclair. All feel that he lacks the large audience he deserves. Yet the curious reader, anxious to gain more information about this somewhat enigmatic writer, of undoubted power (and above all vision), may easily find himself defeated. He is not even ...”

“... of the epidemic. A few days later, Patrick was joined in hospital by his nine-year-old brother, Andrew. Their older brother, Alexander, had felt the same headache and pricking in the fingers as their father but, like him, did not fall ill. Andrew seemed at first to be severely affected in his muscles, but eventually ...”

“... and the Mascarene islands. Functionaries like Pierre Poivre in Mauritius and Alexander Anderson in Saint Vincent combined Enlightenment ideas about agronomy and plant chemistry with a proto-Romantic appreciation of nature, and, above all, a sensitivity to the impact of capitalist agriculture on tropical island ecosystems. These fertile, fragile environments ...”

“... Twenty​ years ago, Andrew Motion, one of Philip Larkin’s literary executors, wrote a scholarly and comprehensive authorised biography of the poet, whom he had known well; it was subtitled ‘A Writer’s Life’. Motion informed his readers that some important ingredients of Larkin’s life were still unavailable, especially most of the letters written to Monica Jones, a lecturer at the University of Leicester, who was his closest companion and lover, but never wife ...”

“... disillusionment inspired the grim panacea advanced in 1698 by the cosmopolitan, freethinking laird Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun. Confronting the problem of mass evictions and vagrancy brought about by the famine, Fletcher recommended the establishment of the form of slavery found in antiquity as a means of relieving the poor and putting them to work for the ...”

“... Had she not had about her a touch of the holy fool, the strange and specialised soul of a secular saint, her life and work would not have attained its compelling singularity. She famously said that the artist should paint with her back to the world. The world, meanwhile, was always ready to embrace her, and in the 1960s she was a successful member of the New ...”

“... you?” said Silver, derisively … “What is this good? … by all stories, you ain’t no such saint … Which is which? Which is good, and which bad?”’ As the captain starts to denounce Silver again, the piece ends with the captain saying: ‘“But there’s the ink-bottle opening. To quarters!” And indeed the author was just then beginning to ...”

“... long-debated Iraqi weapons of mass destruction did not exist.’ Four weeks after the broadcast of Andrew Gilligan’s Today story, Campbell had not asked for an apology for it specifically, had not referred it to the BBC complaints department, and had not mentioned it at lunch with Gilligan’s boss, Richard Sambrook. But he then made ‘three key ...”