“... he dedicates to Cornelius Nepos in poem 1. The standard Latin text of Catullus’ works (which may or may not include this ‘witty booklet’) is one of the slimmest volumes in the Oxford Classical Texts series, and yet this diminutive collection of ‘trifles’, as Catullus calls them, has generated enough commentary ...”

“... if they didn’t. George Bush called it ‘a defining moment’ for the new Iraq. This time Bush may be right; although, once again, he may not understand the seriousness of the fight he is getting into. The Shia community is splitting apart after five years of solidarity. It is a split not just between the government and ...”

“... 2014 Immigration Act, which contained the flagship policies of the then home secretary, Theresa May. Foremost among them was the plan to create a ‘hostile environment’, with the aim of making it harder for illegal immigrants to work and live in the UK. By forcing landlords, employers, banks and NHS services to run immigration status checks, the policy ...”

“... 8 May, Sunderland. A massive new feeding frenzy. The Telegraph has got its hands on a computer disc of our unexpurgated expenses claims and has begun publishing highlights. Page after unedifying page . . . The damage is incalculable. Not just to us, but to the entire parliamentary system. We are sinking in a great swamp of derision and loathing ...”

“... in a delicate copperplate hand, ‘The daughter of Admiral Walker’, followed by a signature: ‘David Wilkie f-t 1840’. Near her there used to hang another portrait, of a fantastical fellow in a high tarbush with a long, dangling plume, his chest puffed out in his dress uniform, with prominent epaulettes, medals at his throat and a long scimitar cradled ...”

“... in its domestic form, thanks to the recent fiscal and sexual peccadilloes of TV preachers, it may come as a surprise to learn that these organisations, NTM and SIL, dedicated to the completion of the Great Commission, represent the biggest missionary enterprise in Christian history. Such people have no time for the swaggerers and braggarts of the ...”

“... is knowledge?’ they are interested in knowledge itself; studying the verb ‘knows’ may or may not be a step along the way. Their answers take the form of what the metaphysician Cian Dorr calls ‘identifications’, attempts to define the essential nature of knowledge by completing the Platonic formula: ‘To ...”

“... fashion speak ‘British’ means outdoorsy, aristocratic, pink-cheeked and rebellious) and devil-may-care-about-this-dress attitude (not by a British dressmaker, which might have been too much for the foreign advertisers) signified by her just-mussed hair. The Black Opium shot doesn’t attempt nearly so much, and it doesn’t need to; it’s only an ...”

“... be dead within months. He took the risk and arrived at Wilhelm Stekel’s clinic in Vienna in May 1927. Stekel practised what he called the ‘active-analytic’ method, and made much shorter work of psychoanalysis than the Freudians did. As Delany explains, he didn’t ‘sit around while his patients slowly uncovered their subconscious fantasy ...”

“... periodicals. It acquired considerable influence and circulation before its shutdown in May 1863, as well as keeping the heads of the brothers Dostoevsky above water financially. Both brothers were heroes, in terms of the efforts they made and the volume of work they undertook, but the elder, Mikhail, was the more heroic of the two, and when he died ...”

“... up and down university corridors holding highly radioactive materials tight against his chest may have contributed to the stomach cancer that killed Fermi in his fifties.) Fermi was special in his generation of physicists in combining both theoretical and experimental skills, one sense – specific to physics – in which he knew everything. Gesturing at ...”

“... and, according to official figures, killed around 12,000 in combat, though the real figure, in David Anderson’s view, is ‘likely to have been more than 20,000’. In addition, Caroline Elkins claims, up to 100,000 died in the detention camps. It is the scale of the British atrocities in Kenya that is the most startling revelation of these books. We ...”

“... To understand Nicole Kidman, David Thomson argues, you need to see a film called In the Cut. Not because Kidman is in it. She isn’t. The film stars Meg Ryan, is directed by Jane Campion and tells the story of how a lonely creative writing teacher, Fran, becomes involved with a cop (Mark Ruffalo) who is investigating a string of particularly gruesome murders ...”

“... as well as sentences like these, cumulative and insistent, as his own so often were. The title of David Bellos’s book on Les Misérables – The Novel of the Century – immediately tells us we’re in the territory; Hugo is greater than his rivals; Bellos has fallen under the spell. ‘I was entranced,’ he tells us at once of his first reading of the ...”

“... wealthy interlopers​ most determined to flout local traditions were the Barclay brothers. Sir David and Sir Frederick, owners of the Daily Telegraph, became interested in Sark affairs after they bought the small neighbouring island of Brecqhou in 1993 and spent millions on a castle and gardens there. Under Sark’s tax laws, they were liable to pay the ...”