“... They were the most real, the closest to the earth, to birth and death, to laughter and weeping.’ John Lossing Buck determined that 79 per cent of the Chinese labour force were farmers, with an average family farm of 2.62 acres. (In the United States, 40 acres had always been seen as the minimum for subsistence farming, as in ‘40 acres and a mule’.) This ...”

“... human cases rarely exceeds a couple of thousand. As the Oxford Textbook of Medicine says: ‘The major animal reservoirs are urban rats as well as rural rodents including ground squirrels and prairie dogs. The Oriental rat flea Xenopsylla cheopis is the most efficient vector. When bitten by a rodent flea humans become an accidental host and play no role in ...”

“... the ethnographic collection was moved into one of the wings to become part of what was now a major exposition of ‘mankind’ in all its glory from the year dot. Jawbones, flints and assorted prehistoric matter were shifted to the new museum from the Jardin des plantes to thicken up this notion of a voyage around the species. The Palais de Chaillot was ...”

“... Coleridge’s​ favourite novelist, John Galt, had a gift for encapsulating disgrace under pressure, and his novels of small-town Scottish life are among the early masterpieces of British political fiction. After a life of robust colonial effort, during which he founded the Canadian city of Guelph, Galt – exhausted and impoverished – came back to Greenock and died there in 1839 ...”

“... echo in Namier’s fascination with the collective and the irrational. Freudianism was another major influence, imbibed by way of Freud’s disciple Theodor Reik, whom Namier met in Vienna in the 1920s. Reik told him that psychoanalysis could cure his insomnia. We shouldn’t overplay the intellectual pedigree of Namier’s ideas, however. When at Balliol ...”

“... he was born in America and knew Africa only at second hand. Both Equiano and Spavens fought in major actions in 1759, Britain’s ‘year of victories’: Equiano as a powder-boy on Edward Boscawen’s flagship the Namur at the Battle of Lagos, and Spavens as a topman on the frigate Vengeance at Quiberon Bay. Equiano later sailed to the Arctic with the ...”

“... in an interview. This doesn’t apply to his paintings of the 1930s, except perhaps to his other major landscape, Larchant of 1939, an exercise in restrained pictorial geometry designed to give eloquence to the church tower set in the middle distance but just breaking through the horizon – the tower of an ancient church, made a symbol of la France ...”

“... children presumed dead and travel to Palestine on a transport designed for orphans (as recorded in Major/Minor, the memoir of Arikha’s daughter Alba). The convoy struck mines in the Black Sea: of the 1500 children who were evacuated, only 130 survived the journey.‘What is modern about him primarily is, if you wish, his anxiety,’ Robert Hughes later said ...”

“... control their own fate: ‘We are out for life and all that life can give us,’ the revolutionary John Maclean said at his trial for sedition in 1918. George Square, 31 January 1919 My grandparents met at a Glasgow ILP branch sometime around the end of the First World War, and I’ve always had a rather romantic view of the party and of that ...”

“... example, author, with her husband, of My Boy Jack? The Search for Kipling’s Only Son (1998). (John Kipling died in his first half-hour in action – at the age of 18 – at Loos in 1915. Though his stricken father carried on a 20-year search for his grave, his remains were not found until 1992.) When not writing, the Holts run a sprightly operation known ...”

“... having flung myself through a plate-glass window. I also wanted to get perfect grades. No: the major dissipations this holiday were candy and coffee and buying things online with just one click. Before I left, Blakey had given me some chocolate cigarettes, and at night, lying on my back under the covers with the laptop on my stomach – my mother had put ...”

“... as both shadow leader of the house and shadow Welsh secretary. Corbyn and his shadow chancellor, John McDonnell, have also been abandoned by several of the high-profile economists they signed up as advisers in 2015, including Thomas Piketty and David Blanchflower (who tweeted ‘he has no economic policies’). Corbyn’s former policy chief, Neale ...”

“... conceal these links. It even instructed Crown forensic scientists – as one was to testify to Sir John May – to alter their statements to remove reference to the evidence which connected the Guildford and Woolwich offences to the other crimes. At the unsuccessful appeal of the Guildford Four in 1977, the Court of Appeal was content to accept the truth of ...”

“... and a counterpoint to, a recent near-fatal illness, whose course he describes in ‘Travels with John Hunter’. (John Hunter is the name of a hospital.) Though Murray’s poem about his time in hospital seems meant as the book’s serious centrepiece, its stanzas keep veering off into nervous, dull jokes: ‘The only poet ...”

“... curiosity, it also suggests dross – and in truth we are never convinced that Katerina is a major talent, though the Faber blurb and catalogue insist that she deserves to be better-known both here and in her own country. All this may make the book sound tricksy, spoof-like, Nabokovian. But what is likable and impressive is that Reid refuses the obvious ...”