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“... day as they circled the exercise yard.De Profundis, a 55,000-word letter addressed to Lord Alfred Douglas, written by Wilde during the final months of his two-year sentence, is a strange literary creation, a hybrid text. It was the only work he produced while in jail. On 4 April 1897 the prison governor informed the Prison Commission that each sheet of the ...”

“... bore a striking resemblance to the civilisation that wrote it up: ‘unmistakably French’, Mary Douglas said in 1967, ‘so urbane, so articulate, with such philosophical insight’. Mutterings came to a head in 1991, when the Belgian anthropologist Walter van Beek decided to take Griaule and Dieterlen apart: they had forced their material, and ...”

“... make for the cultural universals urged by anthropologists as different as Claude Lévi-Strauss and Mary Douglas. Cultures – a word that has long been overused, and which I try to avoid – are entities that exist because children are nurtured into systems of practices and reactions that define the collective lives of individuals. Nurture, as Galton ...”

“... in the Marshalsea. It wasn’t the childhood he wanted, so he hadn’t spoken about it. For Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, in his clever new study, the mass of biographies can make Dickens’s life seem as inevitable as a fairy tale, his genius so self-evident that a novelist’s career was certain. But the alternative lives he might have led, as a debtor like his ...”

“... We are proud of the national sentiment in Scotland which is associated with the name of Mary Queen of Scots. A simple chronicle of her sufferings was the first tale of sorrow over which we wept ... In graver manhood we are not ashamed to acknowledge, that we cannot peruse the volumes of her wrongs without emotion ...”

“... and film and photographs of the murders – with all the risks of voyeurism that that entails. Douglas Crimp’s On the Museum’s Ruins is a contribution to these wide debates on the nature of the museum object. A collection of nine previously published articles (plus a new Introduction), it focuses on the place of photography within the museum. What ...”

“... Ann Douglas’s The Feminisation of American Culture, first published in 1977, now appears in Britain at the same moment as its long-delayed successor, Terrible Honesty. Looking back at the earlier book, Douglas remarks that her ‘excavation and re-evaluation of American feminine 19th-century literature’ has been continued by many other historians, mostly women, who have rebelled against what she calls, in tones more civil than those of some of her successors, a literary canon consisting ‘of almost exclusively male-authored, conspicuously shaped and achieved works ...”

“... within ongoing moral conversations – and we rarely expect consensus to emerge from those. Mary Douglas once asked rhetorically whether we can ‘know the risks we face, now or in the future’. ‘No, we cannot,’ she answered, ‘but yes, we must act as if we do.’ The game of predicting future states is wracked with uncertainties, and it’s ...”

“... his humane impulses. Some of Shaw’s humane impulses were exercised, by letter, on Lord Alfred Douglas. Shaw’s only meeting with Douglas was at the Café Royal on the fateful afternoon in 1895 when Frank Harris and Shaw tried to dissuade Oscar Wilde from the libel action he had set in train against ...”

“... Henry’s desire to remarry after Jane Seymour’s death, and that he wants himself to marry Mary, the king’s daughter, so he can set his own heirs on the throne. Cromwell can flatter Henry by telling him ‘Your Majesty is the only prince. The mirror and the light of other kings,’ but, as the king says, ‘he has never forgiven me for Wolsey.’ As ...”

“... term ‘metaphysical’). But Amis is less concerned with reconstituting the mysterious past of Mary Lamb (as she arbitrarily calls herself) than with exploiting her as a centre of deranged consciousness. For Mary the common world is defamiliarised. Thus, for instance, she tackles the telephone: ...”

“... experiences gets caught up in Don Juan. ‘Send me a good Cocker,’ Byron writes to his banker Douglas Kinnaird, referring to the author of a 17th-century manual: ‘or the best Simplifier of Arithmetic – and you cannot imagine the difference.’ By the same principle of good husbandry, he puts Cocker to use in Don Juan:   Though all Exchequer ...”

“... first two months of 1895 were busy for Oscar Wilde. In late January he was in Algiers with Alfred Douglas. He wrote to Robert Ross: ‘There is a great deal of beauty here. The Kabyle boys are quite lovely. At first we had some difficulty procuring a proper civilised guide. But now it is all right and Bosie and I have taken to haschish: it is quite ...”

“... be of serious social importance? Both Randall Balmer, a professor of history at Columbia, and Douglas Kennedy, an American writer resident in London, confronted this question on numerous occasions in their travels through the evangelical sub-culture of America. Their narratives abound with the exploits of Christian stunt women, Christian tee-shirt ...”

“... lording it over Gotham, had crossed the Atlantic in two and a half days, whereas the Queen Mary, on whose maiden voyage I had just travelled, had taken nearly twice as long, shore to shore. In both craft the passengers dressed for dinner. The Hindenburg apparently had a priest to conduct Mass; the Queen Mary had a ...”