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“... that the British state, of which it was a part, was one of the main protagonists in the conflict? Robert Savage believes that the corporation passed this test with honour: ‘the BBC was attacked, threatened and bullied by a variety of actors, but did its best to stand its ground and maintain editorial independence and journalistic integrity.’ But the ...”

“... back-lit, his dishevelled white hair glowing like a saintly halo. Or the gaunt stick-figure of Robert Oppenheimer in his last years, hair close-cropped – a starving Buddha, worn down by political persecution and the atomic scientist’s ‘knowledge of sin’. Even now, the cover of A Brief History of Time sets a tiny, and almost literally ...”

“... Maria Theresa​ Walburga Amalia Christine, as she was baptised in Vienna in 1717, did not expect to become queen – or ‘female king’ (rex femina) as she was known in several of her many lands. After observing the ravages of the War of the Spanish Succession, Charles VI issued the Pragmatic Sanction, an edict which aimed to ensure that his (as yet unborn) children – even his daughters – would stand in line to inherit his kingdoms ...”

“... but it is pursued with remarkable force and fascination in Richard Holmes’s study. Richard Savage, the young Johnson’s alter ego, was a poor and talented writer whom Johnson had met in Grub Street. Each took a fancy to the other, and they became companions in want in London’s lower depths, where they often walked all night, deploring the hypocrisy ...”

“... that has yet appeared in any age or nation’. Gibbon considered them to be an expression of ‘savage fanaticism’. In a History of the Crusades (1820), one of the earliest studies devoted specifically to the topic, Charles Mills deplored the medieval fanaticism and popery. In The Mameluke or Slave Dynasty of Egypt (1896), William Muir, while suggesting ...”

“... pleasure: narcotic, sexual, fiscal – it has not been a particularly auspicious one either. For Robert Louis Stevenson, literary impersonation wasn’t only an essential tutelary tool but also a way for mature authors to widen their range. Out of imitation, Stevenson felt, could spring originality: pastiche was an indispensable way to harness what he called ...”

“... are always vast, his victories inevitable and his treatment of the conquered almost invariably savage. The history of Central Asia in the late 14th century reads like a piece of plotless Grand Guignol. So it’s curious that Tamerlane, though somewhat neglected by the academics, has long been a favourite subject for popular biography, and Marozzi’s book ...”

“... imperial hegemonies). ‘Barbarian’ and ‘barbarous’ are now typically used to suggest the savage or uncivilised without any strong consciousness of a linguistic factor, but the history of modern encounters with ‘primitive’ peoples, from 16th-century Amerindians to the various subject races of more recent colonial perspectives, shows that the ...”

“... Robert Oppenheimer knew Sanskrit. Quotations from the Bhagavad Gita flashed through his mind when he witnessed the first atomic explosion in New Mexico in 1945: ‘Suppose a thousand suns should rise together into the sky: such is the glory of the Shape of the Infinite God.’ Reading that same chapter of the Bhagavad Gita in Darjeeling in 1962, Allen Ginsberg thought of something else: the coloured wheels of psilocybin-induced visions ...”

“... political cartoons at the time of the Dreyfus Affair, reproduced in many books as samples of the savage and hysterical polemics of the time. It is regrettable that more of them are not reproduced here, especially those that are analysed in the text. Gyp’s skill and influence lay in the creation of unsubtle, memorable stereotypes, especially of ...”

“... voyage to Australia in the early 19th century: that is all, apart from a letter from the Reverend Robert James Colley to his sister, purloined by Talbot and pasted into the journal. Only the title of the novel suggests anything different. ‘Rites of passage’ is a term out of 20th-century anthropology and sits oddly here, warning that Mr Golding means more ...”

“... effect is sculptural, a solid but always shapely block of exquisite prose, in which the author’s savage, clean-limbed sentences are usually indistinguishable from his characters’. In particular, in St Aubyn’s trilogy of short novels, published under the title Some Hope, and in Mother’s Milk, which now makes a quartet, there is a clear alignment of the ...”

“... guests with more than just the keys to their rooms. According to Thompson’s latest biographer, Robert Polito, even as a teenager Thompson ‘moonlighted as a bootlegger, a drug peddler, a grifter, a pimp and a male escort’. His extra-curricular activities often added as much as three hundred dollars to his weekly wage but, at the same time, demanded the ...”

“... truth – as on meeting the migrant workers his father calls ‘savages’: ‘They did not look savage up close. They looked poor and obedient.’ Or on going ashore: ‘That was Honduras, so far. Dead dogs and vultures, a dirty beach and chicken-huts and roads leading nowhere. The view from the ship had been like a picture, but now we were inside that ...”

“... advice: ‘You must stand up to Wilfred.’ Thesiger kept diaries of his travels and sojourns in savage wildernesses. He then polished his jottings in the form of letters to his mother and it was those that furnished the main source for his books, written years later, most notably Arabian Sands (1959) and The Marsh Arabs (1964). Thesiger’s correspondence ...”