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“... Clock (2016), Riskin mentions a 16th-century devil carved from wood that appeared to burst from a cage: ‘horrible, twisted, horned, rolling furious eyes, sticking out a blood-red tongue, [it seemed] to throw itself upon the spectator, spitting in his face and letting out great howls.’ Inside was a set of hidden bellows powered by a suspended weight: the ...”

“... Antrim (1901), a collection of slightly fey dialect poems, was much praised by the poet laureate, John Masefield, and set to music by the Irish composers Charles Villiers Stanford and Hamilton Harty. They were Edwardian popular songs of the sort that Bartell D’Arcy might have been asked to sing in ‘The Dead’, when he wasn’t having a go at ‘The Lass ...”

“... like Peter, Juba is an Eldorado: he earns three times more here than he could at home.Outside the John Garang mausoleum, a vast empty lot surrounded by a tall iron fence with gilded spikes, I suddenly find myself swallowed up in a swarming crowd. All along the fence, thousands of people are patiently waiting in line. In the street, among policemen and ...”

“... quality – a little like Weegee’s – at once random and composed. In one, the circus director John Ringling North dominates the right half of the frame, shouting instructions to an unseen person, while above and to the left a high-wire act has two showgirls suspended from the wheels of a bicycle: the picture frame is divided by a balancing bar carried by ...”

“... The yoking of supposedly high and low aspects of life isn’t new, it’s there in Lawrence, and John Cowper Powys finds in it a sort of transgressive holiness, but here it represents no more than a reflex of disgust.Before the ceremony a grieving relative had insisted on the coffin being opened, motivated supposedly by ‘a Huisgenoot article she read last ...”

“... Instead, he closed his poem after eight chapters, consigning his hero and heroine to the gilded cage of 1820s Petersburg and Moscow. Like Stendhal’s characters, the people in Eugene Onegin must fight literature in order to live. As all readers notice, Onegin, Lensky and Tatiana are – like the poem itself – fragile compounds of influences, most of them ...”

“... is a holographic slave, about to be auctioned, who speaks to visitors from a small underground cage. In the final exhibit holographic prisoners in orange jumpsuits sit behind protective glass. The museum traces the line between slavery and contemporary incarceration in the US – one in three black men spend time in prison; the prison population grew 700 ...”

“... rich. She distinguishes the condition of those unfortunates for whom the world is a melancholy cage of privilege in which their every whim can be immediately satisfied from that of ordinary grafting millionaires and multi-millionaires. There is an unbridgeable chasm between Haves and Have-Yachts. And bigger yachts. And yachts with helipads and ...”

“... he would have been disappointed. There was some half-hearted praise from Movement types, but when John Carey, for example, needed an honourable popular writer to batter the highbrows with in The Intellectuals and the Masses (1992), he turned to Arnold Bennett. Morgan’s biography had a memorable centrepiece: a description of the senile Maugham crapping on ...”

“... forget. She has been stoned in Khomeini’s brickyard but she does not forget. She has hung in a cage at Cumae wasting away but she does not forget. She has burned in Israeli phosphorus for hours but she does not forget. She has crackled in the marketplace at Rouen but she does not forget. She has been injected with kerosene in Belsen but she does not ...”

“... work of an obscure photographer she had discovered in Paris (Atget), Ralph Steiner, Paul Grotz, John Cheever, Ben Shahn and, most important of all, Lincoln Kirstein.Evans always acknowledged the role luck played in his life, and nothing could have been luckier than the friendship he formed with Kirstein, whose influence on his career was so profound that ...”

“... would be seen through its ogival windows. What bells had not been evacuated from St Catherine, St John, St Brigit, Saints Barbara, Elizabeth, Peter and Paul, from Trinity to Corpus Christi, melted in their belfries and dripped away without pomp or ceremony. In the Big Mill red wheat was milled. Butcher Street smelled of burnt Sunday roast. The Municipal ...”

“... Barbara Bray takes a feelingful turn, starting with a letter of condolence written in March 1958. John Bray, Barbara’s estranged husband, the father of her two small girls, has died, and Beckett, unusually for his letters by now, brings his full rhetorical resources to bear on the task in hand: All I could say, and much more, and much better, you will have ...”

“... or rather J.J. Beegan did. When I turned to the Irish census records I could quite easily find John Beegan, who was born in 1868, the eldest child of John and Jane Beegan. In 1901 they were living together with the younger Beegans, Mary and Thomas, at 23 Dunlo Hill in Ballinasloe. On the census form, ...”

“... by the Teflon-coated fabric of the Dome, was once the Execution Dock. The gallows and iron cage moved here from Wapping, when the sensibilities of that district, much closer to civilisation, were elevated by the mansions of marine speculators and the better class of sea captain. Executions and bloated bodies washed over by three tides were less of a ...”