“... the judge decided treatment wouldn’t be helpful. He was sent down for 20 years. In 1613, a young German girl, Maria Ostertag of Ellwangen, came to the authorities, confessed that she was a witch and implicated 34 other people. She had copulated with Satan in horrific secret rituals – his penis, she said, was hard, cold and hurtful. She also claimed ...”

“... opposition to the sultan’s tyranny had become widespread by the turn of the century among the young of all ethnic groups, not least Turks themselves. In 1908 rumours of an impending Russo-British carve-up of the region triggered a military rising in Monastir and Salonika. The revolt spread rapidly, and within a couple of weeks had become ...”

“... the white-walled earth kiln ran into technical difficulties with her presentation. Karen Russo, a young Israeli artist, had developed a fascination with William Lyttle, the so-called ‘Mole Man’ of Hackney. Lyttle, talked up by estate agents promoting the auction of the ruined shell of his former house, a gothic property wedged like a ghost ship in the ...”

“... Bosnia and Kosovo than the stations of his own bitter journey to the final betrayal: there was the young boy, all but orphaned, placing tins of burning pitch in the stubble, waiting for the sound of aircraft; then the elderly farmer, cowering in his house under Croatian artillery fire, days after the Serbs had surrendered; and a few years later, the defeated ...”

“... left behind were that it should be used in any way possible – short of falling into the hands of Michael Winner – ‘to make money for my boys’: Mark Pearce, her second husband, and Alexander, the couple’s son, born in 1983. As Edmund Gordon says towards the beginning of his biography, Carter was never so widely acclaimed in life as she would be in the ...”

“... the railways. For a minority, the enthusiasts, almost exclusively men (and not, on the whole, young men), the railways are a consuming, fanatical interest. No detail, past or present, is too minor or banal to escape celebration, classification, re-enactment, preservation and restoration. The majority, though, speak of the railways in the utilitarian terms ...”

“... He was certainly a victim of the Cultural Revolution. Yet in a sense he was fortunate. He was too young to have become a Red Guard, which might have damaged his later political career, and he was neither killed nor morally destroyed before he was rusticated. There were worse fates: his siblings were incarcerated and one of his sisters killed herself.The fable ...”

“... of British intellectuals who have thought themselves above expressing national pride. A young academic (in his mid-thirties), he belongs to a generation which has become alert to the political importance of patriotism and which takes Britain’s European future pretty much for granted. His enjoyable tour through the past sixty years stops at the ...”

“... directing our attention unswervingly to what is specific and different about this moment.’ As a young socialist organiser in Turin, Gramsci had enthusiastically supported the Bolshevik Revolution. After 1926, imprisoned by the fascists, he turned his attention to figuring out why the revolutions that almost happened across Europe in the 1910s and 1920s had ...”

“... the novelist, Joan Acocella speaks with some reverence of Cath-er’s ‘Duse revelation’: the young writer’s precocious verdict, having seen both actresses perform onstage in the 1890s, that Duse was the superior artist because of the classical restraint she invariably brought to her roles. Bernhardt ‘expressed’ tragic emotion, Cather wrote in a ...”

“... ends. Her tale of scholarly intrigue and Cold War defamation finds a useful counterpoint in Michael Rogin’s Subversive Genealogy: The Politics and Art of Herman Melville (1979). In this account, Moby-Dick is not about what 20th-century scholars thought America should become, but about what it became in any case. Ishmael warns us against ‘scouting at ...”

“... with whom they shared an interest in theory. Initially, Jones, together with Jeremy Dixon and Michael Gold, worked for the firm of Frederick Macmanus and Partners, for whom they designed a glassy, Mediterranean block of flats and shops in Clipstone Street in Fitzrovia, a hall of residence for Woolwich Polytechnic and two blocks as part of that ...”

“... have decided it in favour of Podemos, the party created virtually out of nothing two years ago by young political science professors from Madrid. It’s no surprise that governments whose fortunes are riding on the philosophy of ‘no pain, no gain’ should emphasise that their democratic mandates are just as strong as Syriza’s. Merkel insisted that ...”

“... are the few Englishmen in British India who gave aid to nationalists or Communists. One of them, Michael Carritt, has written a light-hearted account of his brief career in the Indian Civil Service.4 At vastly greater risk, a few Frenchmen in Algeria gave aid secretly to the rebels. Admirable too, though unlikely to be admired by Tories or Reaganites, is the ...”

“... offers a frightening gallery of rogue vents – from Eric von Stroheim in The Great Gabbo to Michael Redgrave in Dead of Night and Anthony Hopkins in Magic – who have been led astray by their dummy-selves; and real vents can be just as mixed up as fictional ones. When the English entertainer Arthur Prince died in 1948, his jolly partner Jim was ...”