“... a sense in which Hourani withdrew from that century. Apart from political disappointment, boredom may well have been a factor in his renunciation of active politics. ‘My boredom threshold is low,’ he was fond of remarking. So he moved from politics to political history and, later, from political to social history. He preferred to write about the 18th and ...”

“... Porter’s poem begins by acknowledging separation, remorse, confusion and affection: In wet May, in the months of change, In a country you wouldn’t visit, strange Dreams pursue me in my sleep, Black creatures of the upper deep – Though you are five months dead, I see You in guilt’s iconography, Dear Wife, lost beast, beleaguered child As the poem ...”

“... a strip that refined a single situation for more than thirty years, is another. And then there is Robert Crumb, better known as R. Crumb, the originator of so-called ‘underground comix’. Now 82, Crumb is America’s greatest cartoonist. Inimitable and inventive as Herriman and Gould were, neither had his range, nor his independence. Crumb, who developed ...”

“... temperaments – one cautious and respectable, the other flashy and reckless. On 11 March 1775, Robert, the respectable half of the Perreau twins, a well-connected London apothecary, stormed into the Bow Street magistrate’s office to report a forgery. Not, as you might expect, a forgery of which he was the victim, but one of which he was the alleged ...”

“... and his children, who seem to be inexplicably upset by Hannah, or by her not knowing them. You may begin to worry that they are her family, unrecognised and, as strangers, faintly repellent. As it turns out, you’d be wrong, which is a relief of sorts, and a lesson in not jumping to conclusions. She does have a family, however: a mother, father and ...”

“... collegial government. The question why this should have been so also yields answers which may apply to many, even most cases. The most obvious explanation might seem to be pathological: the personal inadequacy of monarchs who were unfit for the burdens imposed on them by the lottery of inheritance and who could not manage without their mayors of the ...”

“... as big as a football’. Mao and his men rated the power of words higher than most, and this may explain why they went to such lengths to suppress non-aligned literature in China. From the early 1960s until the mid-1980s almost all Western books were prohibited and the printing presses clattered away producing agitprop: multi-volume hagiographies of ...”

“... was ‘Fountains’, but there isn’t a poem called that. Schmidt means ‘Fountain’. This may be just a typo, but it’s a revealing one. If you read a lot of Jennings’s work, the poems blur into one another; there is too much repetition, too much rewriting of the same poem, too many neat little verse essays. There is a lack of rhythmical ...”

“... This is true. Few Westerners take account of Muslim resentment about the Crusades. In part this may be because only a small handful feel bitter about the Muslim conquest of Syria in the seventh century, of Spain in the eighth century and of the Balkans during the 15th and 16th centuries. History moves on. However, as Hillenbrand notes, it ‘is a strange ...”

“... contemporary audience. Merer’s text is more like a timesheet or a ship’s log than a memoir. He may have felt wonder, but was hardly compelled to write it down.Merer and his team loaded their boat with limestone blocks at one of the two quarries at Tura. They sailed north to She Khufu (Lake of Khufu), before proceeding to Akhet Khufu (Horizon of Khufu), the ...”

“... This article by Robert Fisk was commissioned by the ‘New Yorker’, who subsequently declined to publish it on the grounds that it was too ‘polemical’ Selma Tawil brought the fifty-year-old keys into the room, sat down in her corner armchair and let them spill out of her hands onto the floor: heavy store-room keys, rusting cupboard keys, keys shaped like backbones for office safes, car keys for an old British-made Hillman, and one larger steel key with a three-and-a-half inch shaft, gun-metal grey with an elegant knot at one end and a broad, worn blade ...”

“... And, metaphor apart, a domino-effect is at work in the narrative. ‘If I have robbed you, may I be turned into a leper!’ says an old servant, dismissed for theft. Years later he returns for forgiveness, stricken with leprosy (all curses and prophecies come true in this book): mistaken for the ghost of another character, he provokes frightened ...”

“... Marthe Robert is a well-known freelance among French Germanisten. She has written extensively on Freudian theory, on myth and Romanticism, and she collaborated with André Breton on a splendid volume of Lichtenberg’s aphorisms. She is deeply familiar with Kafka’s writings, having translated most of them into French: her knowledge of books on Kafka and the world he lived in is less impressive ...”

“... passages that occasionally interrupt the book, that Daniel will eventually realise he is gay, and may be transgender. ‘You have to appreciate that I never thought of myself as a man,’ he says midway through the novel. ‘I did not know then that it was girls not boys who grew their hair and their nails long.’ I suspect that Elmet would like to be ...”

“... about people in the world outside Africa and, indeed, about himself? There are at least as many may-have-beens in her account of Leo Africanus as there were in her retelling of the story of Martin Guerre. Most of what we know about his life and attitudes comes from The Description of Africa. One of the most interesting features of the book, to which ...”