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“... In the early Eighties, Western governments, notably those of America, Britain and France, were anxious to assess the probable rate of growth and pathways of infection of Aids. They sponsored extensive sex surveys in order to find out, for example, the number of sexual partners an average male had in his lifetime and how many used safe sex. The British survey was carried out by four women, primarily trained in medical statistics, epidemiology and health care ...”

“... Each chapter of Julia Blackburn’s peculiar and haunting book has its epigraph. The largest number of quotations are from Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass; the second most frequent source is King Lear. Absurdity and tragedy alternate and overlap in this tale of pomp in reduced circumstances. As Lear discovered, a king’s no better than a fool when the winds are blowing ...”

“... of the dialogue, to connect knowledge with the ability to explain, and to have mastery over a field, practical or intellectual, by way of having mastery over the basic elements of that field. Socrates finds it obvious, for example, that someone who can correctly spell the first syllable of ‘Theaetetus’ but gets ...”

“... awful, whether they be shallow advice-mongers on local radio or self-dramatising actresses. Julia O’Faolain is good at rendering their excesses without falling into caricature. As for Carla, she is worried not just about reaching 40 but about reaching 37. When a neighbour’s child is hurt in a swimming-pool accident, she begins to fear ‘that ...”

“... And so,’ Bréhal said, ‘love would be time become available to the senses.’ Julia Kristeva, Les Samouraïs The genuine charm and considerable strength of Julia Kristeva’s writing are inseparable from a certain solemnity and excess of diligence, a heavy shadow that dogs her like an obligation ...”

“... three events as having formed young Aldous’s personality: the premature death of his mother, Julia Huxley (née Arnold), when he was 14; his temporary blindness three years later; and – most damaging – the suicide of his older brother, Trevenen, who hanged himself when Aldous was 20. These traumas resurface, symptomatically, everywhere in his ...”

“... among others. Only rarely was this sprawl of gods, rituals and ideas understood as a unified field. The Greeks wouldn’t have recognised our notion that religions are distinctive to particular peoples. They tended to see other peoples’ gods as versions of their own: the Egyptian Ptah was treated as the equivalent of Hephaestus, the Phoenician Melqart ...”

“... all celebrities (whatever the source of their celebrity) are experts. No one would appoint Julia Neuberger, distinguished person though she is, to judge a high-diving competition. The fact that they are judges and the competition a judicial process imposes an invincible solemnity. Comic novels don’t do well. Malcolm Bradbury’s Post-Modernist ...”

“... flooding.) His biological father, Noah, worked in a sawmill on the Mangold plantation. His mother, Julia, already had several children with Annye Anderson’s father, Charles Dodds, a barber and furniture-maker who had been forced off the acres he owned by a lynch mob, probably in 1909. Anderson mentions a knife fight with a white neighbour, apparently over a ...”

“... in which they do so. Frances Partridge was born in 1901: she spans the century – a rich enough field, one would think. And her previous book, A Pacifist’s War, is eminently, even compulsively readable: personal recollection is tethered to public events; the immediacy of her wartime diary allows the reader to share the depression, the sinking in the ...”

“... had two daughters, Maesa and Domna. Severus, by then a governor in Gaul, sought the hand of Julia Domna after his first wife died. They married in 187. Thus far, it is an unremarkable story of provincial families on the make, but everything changed in 193. After a brief period in the political wilderness, Severus was sent to govern the province of ...”

“... of the diplomatic row over the opium issue in 1839-42 (the period of the First Opium War, which Julia Lovell’s book focuses on) revolved around who should ‘kowtow’ to whom. It hardly seems surprising that the event has slipped British historical memory. I don’t imagine the topic will make it into Michael Gove’s ‘patriotic’ school history ...”

“... work from dawn till dusk for the public weal – but without the tools men had to hand. Why? Julia Bush’s earnest new book only partly answers this question. The anti-suffragists, she tells us, were much like their suffragist opponents: serious, high-minded, committed to a range of worthy causes, often possessed of advanced views about the need for ...”

“... contemporary ones.) And if Smith is really concerned about Alex’s destiny, his wandering in the field of signs that is his career, then why does the novel so willingly indulge in just the sort of pop-culture vacancy that Alex tries to resist? Such vacancy is embedded deep in the texture of the prose. Thus we read that ‘Alex folded into the door frame like ...”

“... openly plotting revenge. Before Turnbull and Abbott, the Labor prime ministers Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard had repeatedly moved through the revolving doors of leadership, deposing each other with increasing bitterness. And on top of this, since mid-2017 Australian politics has been convulsed by a series of scandals related to Section 44 of the ...”