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“... smoke. In degraded photo-reproduction jagged white spurts of petrol-bombs orgasm among the pebbled bone helmets of snatch-squads. The mob awaits its impresario. Some shockheaded Struwwelpeter. A Malcolm McLaren whispering of historical precedents: Tyburn, the Gordon riots, Newgate ablaze, ‘Dickensian’ revengers pouring out of the slums and rookeries. It ...”

“... the grill. All of them slip a little further into kilter and the permanent rain; a splinter of bone that pierced the right kneecap. As they attached a metal brace to stop his right leg shrivelling shorter than his left, a vision of Mary and her child left his heart serene and his flesh finally untroubled by lust. Ropes tighten into the sea; and all of ...”

“... of the Pevear-Volokhonsky collection, long enough to be published separately in a translation by Ian Dreiblatt, Leskov’s narrative restlessness finds its most compelling representative. Ivan, whom we meet as a monk in later life by the shores of Lake Ladoga, is described as resembling a bogatyr, one of the tall, muscular strongmen heroes of Russian folk ...”

“... Ian​ Hamilton once recounted in the LRB (22 October 1992) that ‘when William F. Buckley Jr sent a copy of his essays to Norman Mailer, he pencilled a welcoming “Hi, Norman!” in the index, next to Mailer’s name.’ The index discloses a lot about the nature of a book, and the passions of its author, more than is sometimes realised (‘acknowledgments’ are similarly illuminating ...”

“... location of the spot: ‘It is usually located about half-way between the back of the pubic bone and the front of the cervix, along the course of the urethra ... and near the neck of the bladder.’ And it is here, say the critics, that Perry is being particularly smart. There is, indeed, they admit, a spot of sorts somewhere round this region, and ...”

“... in the lower left rear (parieto-occipital) region of my skull. The X-rays didn’t show any bone splinters round the edge of the fracture, indicating that whatever hit me might have been ball-shaped. A large stone, say, concealed inside a sock. But who would have hit me? The clinic couldn’t perform the operation I needed and by the time the ambulance ...”

“... to say, such moments were fairly rare, since a good deal of Parliamentary business was just as bone-achingly boring as it is today. But these few shafts of illumination served to supplement my own childhood memories of Welsh miners shuffling along the gutters of well-to-do streets, singing for pennies. It was, as it turned out, a first-class training for ...”

“... us more fit to survive. But if religion is counterfactual, counterintuitive and costly, every bone in the body of natural selection rebels against religion being selected. What could fit us less well for survival than a bunch of false or meaningless beliefs in which individuals and groups invest vast amounts of resources? There have been a lot of answers ...”

“... In his translation of Psalm 3, Milton praises God ‘for thou/Hast smote ere now/On the cheek-bone all my foes,/Of men abhor’d/Hast broke the teeth.’ If a psalmist were to turn up for a few stitches at your local minor injuries clinic, chances are they’d have multiple piercings and facial tattoos, and you’d be wanting to ask them how many hours of ...”

“... feet and eight inches tall, square built, but slouchy in his actions, hard of muscle, solid of bone and lungs, but with a good wide streak of laziness somewhere in him … a medium man, medium wise and medium ignorant, wise in the lessons taught by fighting the weather and working the land, wise in the tricks of the men, women, animals, and all of the ...”

“... organ that hadn’t been operated on, an area of skin that hadn’t been gashed, or a significant bone that hadn’t been cracked.’ This sounds like an entry from Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, and Turner – the author also of Amazing Grace: The Story of America’s Most Beloved Song and a biography of Cliff Richard – can’t be unaware of the implied ...”

“... of sect to sect, patching up old schisms to make a whole and undivided church. (He even asked Ian Paisley to join in a wonderful stroke of naivety or taking the piss – I’ve never quite known which.) He held vast correspondences with priests, archbishops, cures and archimandrites – all of the smallest denominations. The American ones gave him ...”

“... head to explain this? He mentions parts of the body, such as wings, but not flesh and blood and bone. He winces a bit when experimenters confront children with agricultural quasi-artifacts like apples, but does not pause to consider the domesticated plants and animals. I sense, in skimming through Atran’s examples, that he is fascinated by peoples in the ...”

“... left hand he pulled on the index finger; then, using the clam shell like a saw, cut to the bone. He sawed through the bone and pulled the skin and gristle free. He held up the finger joint. The crowd roared and cheered.’But the tensions of Moore’s native Belfast run through all his novels, even those set in ...”

“... Ian Gilmour’s deft and learned book is concerned with the lives of Byron and Shelley up to the morning on which Byron woke up and found himself famous. The poets weren’t to meet for another four years, so Gilmour isn’t telling the history of their acquaintance but its prehistory; and not the least of his book’s many virtues is the way it makes you realise what an odd combination they made ...”