“... happily recorded in her diary how he had begged her to ‘join him’ when he died, presumably by means of a suicide pact of the kind that brought so much posthumous criticism on Arthur Koestler, who got his much younger and perfectly healthy wife to ‘join’ him. Frances, however, was concerned only that she might die first. Happily, she survived him by 27 ...”

“... money to a regional branch of the Communist Workers League; but the will was unwitnessed, which means it’s not valid under Swedish law, so his entire estate has gone to his brother and father. The estate, close to worthless at the time of his death, is now a multi-million-dollar concern. This has led, unsurprisingly, to acrimony. Larsson had been in a ...”

“... who gained international notoriety, mostly through celebrated trials: Huey Newton, Bobby Seale, David Hilliard, Eldridge Cleaver, Kathleen Cleaver, Ericka Huggins, Elaine Brown. But rather than focusing on the sensationalist and salacious aspects of the party’s history – the confrontations, violence, criminality – Bloom and Martin choose to recount ...”

“... scarcely conveys the tense atmosphere as soldiers struggled to find a way across the river by any means; nor does he speculate on their state of mind, caught perhaps between a realisation that becoming a POW made good sense, and a desire to defend the homeland – already a landscape of bombed ruins – at all costs. More might have been saved from the ...”

“... and early 21st centuries, agnostic clerics such as John Robinson, the author of Honest to God, David Jenkins, the controversial bishop of Durham, the Scots Episcopalian bishop of Edinburgh, Richard Holloway, and the Anglican atheist Don Cupitt belong more convincingly in liberal ranks than with authentic enemies of the Enlightenment on the Christian ...”

“... groundbreaking experiments were undertaken by Nikos Logothetis, working with Jeffrey Schall and David Leopold. It had been known since the 19th century that if quite different images are shown to each of your eyes at the same time, your conscious experience doesn’t blend the two but flips between them. If one of your eyes is shown a face and the other is ...”

“... A penis in pickle, and a dreadful wife made to vanish into another dimension by means of an esoteric yoga pose. A narrator who rapes and murders his wife, gratified that the two climaxes coincide (‘I came as she died. That much I can say with pride. I know her death was a moment of intense pleasure to her’). When he wakes up he vomits on the corpse, a reflex of horror and remorse that amounts to a further assault ...”

“... of feminised sentiment is carefully constrained in Dickens’s novels, but it remains the only means to heal division and disease. An unsettled childhood offers some explanation for these creative muddles. Dickens’s mother was lively and sociable, with a habit of irreverent mimicry that her son relished, and later imitated. He came to despise her ...”

“... them to pulse against one another – now drawing in, now glaring out’, shows a consciousness of means, of the pleasures an artist might derive from the act of making which could then become pleasures for an audience. In Mirror of the World a large-scale account of world art is mapped onto a geo-chronological structure, but one traverses these wide ...”

“... French version, the yarmulka is out and the cross (along with the hand of Fatima and the Star of David) has to be very discreet, while some tricky technical problems remain over how to rule on Sikh students. Opponents, including the main French human rights organisation, La Ligue des Droits de l’Homme, have argued rightly that the veil is the real target ...”

“... to be added to spore suspensions to stop them clumping when they are prepared and dried, but as David Henderson from Porton Down said in 1952, in a journal to be found in any medical school library, ‘fortunately many substances added to the suspension will prevent clumping. The simplest and most effective that has been found is sodium alginate used in ...”

“... the register of the internment centre Les Tourelles, a former colonial infantry barracks. ‘J’ means Jewish. Drancy is the name of the camp where these 17-year-old girls were sent, and from where most of them proceeded to Auschwitz. In the face of all this, the very idea of a search warrant begins to seem too orderly, and too sane, a memory of another ...”

“... for a man who had to make a living, there was no reason for ‘travelled people of independent means’ to ‘remain there for more than a week’. Consequently, his son was educated at Eton and New College but did not then go to South Africa. Apart from Brand, Astor was the only member of the group who often exercised good judgment; he did not display it ...”

“... unbreakable spirit to win! Fighting the Hun with pepper? Was that something that Jimmy Perry and David Croft, the fecund scriptwriters of Dad’s Army, dreamed up in a dizzy moment? Not so. Charles Graves, an early historian of the Home Guard, refers to a unit which suggested in orders that any rudimentary weapons ‘could be usefully supplemented by a ...”

“... of the whole enterprise: the recasting of the system of roads and thoroughfares. Efficient means of transport, both to and from and within the city was the founding principle of the grands travaux. The original idea was to link the railway stations, both with each other and with the city centre. Contemporary Paris was to be first and foremost a ...”