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“... autism all around us. The criteria for being autistic have radically expanded since Kanner’s day. This is not just a conceptual change, but also a discovery that took time. When there was no diagnosis of autism, you could not be said to have grown out of it, or recovered, or been cured. Kanner followed up his first patients. None recovered; two survived ...”

“... Tennant. In her portraits she is usually looking away, eyes lifted or lowered, but on Christmas Day 1883, aged 21, she stopped to consider herself: What am I? A little woman with grey eyes with corners to them … & a nose with a lump in the middle, & a square jaw and a nameless complexion with small ears almost round & an ordinary neat figure & next to no ...”

“... through the year of better than 60 per cent. It will be the opening night of Jurassic Park every day at BL 2000. There will be ticket touts in the Euston Road offering desperate American scholars seats for arm-and-a-leg prices. Young women with thesis deadlines will be prostituting their bodies for a carrel. If you want a foretaste of what the BL of the ...”

“... popular entertainment to have a moral, metaphysical or ideological content. The high-minded critic Robin Wood responded to Houston’s article with the kind of righteousness his mentor F.R. Leavis directed against Bloomsbury, dismissing it in Hitchcock’s Films, his classic auteur study of 1965, as the product of a snobbish, dilettante establishment that ...”

“... about. During Giacometti’s visits to London in 1955, 1964 and 1965 I saw him practically every day, whereas Lord, who saw him much more regularly in Paris than I did, was not around much, if at all. So the treatment of those London visits provides a clue to the quality of Lord’s research. I go into the detail that follows with some reluctance: the ...”

“... Door into the Dark (1969). It begins: ‘When you have nothing more to say, just drive / For a day all round the peninsula.’ Heaney extols this landscape, and suggests that when you return home you will uncode all landscapes by this one: ‘things founded clean on their own shapes’. The poem, without strain, describes itself. Like the entranced ...”

“... in a sleazy, sex-filled prequel to James’s novella. Young rightly devotes several pages to Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Man, but Offbeat passes over it as being too well known and moves straight on to The Appointment, a completely forgotten horror film from 1980 in which ‘Edward Woodward comes the closest he ever would to reprising one of his most ...”

“... bin overflowing with blood-soaked tampons viewed through a gauzy curtain, while Vikki Hodgett and Robin Weltsch covered the walls and cupboard doors of their Nurturant Kitchen with moulded foam breasts. Sandy Orgel’s Surrealist-inspired linen closet had a female mannequin trapped between its shelves. Faith Wilding’s Crochet Environment, known as the ...”

“... because when he got up – climbing the ladder one-handed – they’d all disappeared. The next day, a policeman phoned to ask Smith why he’d done that. ‘I said, I didn’t have a choice. I asked him if it had been live, and he said, “You don’t want to know,” so I presume it was.’ Mostly, though, other than sewage or toilet paper the sewers ...”

“... as like as not. We know what they did: rape and pillage. Along with the Crusaders, King Arthur and Robin Hood, they form a major part of our medieval imaginary. For fifty years now specialists in Viking studies have been trying to convince us, without much success, that ‘Viking’ is a job description, not an ethnic category, that behind the generic figure ...”

“... seven years to do it. (The Bloody Sunday inquiry took 12 years to investigate the events of one day.) More than 150 witnesses gave evidence, and more than 150,000 documents have been examined. Even Chilcot seems to have underestimated the scale of the task. In 2012, he told David Cameron that the report was ‘likely to be more than a million ...”

“... in contrast, provided exactly what was sentimentally required by the audience. In the England of Robin Hood and Coeur de Lion, commoner and King find themselves united in manly accord, if ever they can, with the help of a disguise kit, elude the net of intervening ceremony (traditionally the King is ‘a regular guy’ though his courtly advisers are ...”

“... music which is ‘perhaps, the misunderstood utterance of prayer’. It is erev Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, on New York’s Lower East Side and 13-year-old Jakie, son of Cantor and Sarah Rabinowitz, is to chant Kol Nidre in his father’s synagogue. Cut to Jakie performing ‘My Gal Sal’ in a local saloon. The cantor arrives, drags him home by his ...”

“... you could almost drink/To know how jewels taste’. She has sometimes been read as a latter-day Christina Rossetti, but attempts to place her in this lineage are a little strained, and in her poetry the word ‘heaven’ always arrives with a sense of let-down. The only thing Mew wants to be everlasting is transience; angels envy mortals rather than the ...”

“... demands right-wing concessions, especially as they pertain to refugees.Thanks to the journalist Robin Alexander’s Die Getriebenen: Merkel und die Flüchtlingspolitik (as yet untranslated, but something like ‘The Impelled: Merkel and Refugee Politics’), we now have a fine-grained account of Merkel’s decision to open the border in September ...”