“... cases seemed heavier than it had when he unloaded it that morning. ‘Maybe there is a beautiful young lady in the box,’ an airport official joked. There was, of course, a person in the box. It was Carlos Ghosn, the former chairman of the world’s largest car manufacturer, Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi. But nobody knew he’d gone missing yet, and the ...”

“... writings and practices, which … academics deem … taboo’. In his essay on Knight, Michael Taylor quotes the critic on the political theology that lay behind his poses – the thought that ‘the religious importance of literature’ should be proclaimed ‘in a voice of authority’ – and concludes that this phrase can be used to ‘sum up ...”

“... its discourses. The subject, in Auden’s plays, is constructed out of these delusive discourses. Michael Ransom in F6 had acknowledged somewhat abstractly that he, too, was implicated in ‘the web of guilt that prisons every upright person’, that like all the others he is ‘swept and driven by the possessive incompetent fury and the disbelief’. But he ...”

“... a ‘farewell ceremony’ in 18th-century Poland. ‘A certain Miss Szamowska saying goodbye to a young gentleman called Tollohub offered him, as was customary, a glass of wine. Tollohub was already sitting on his horse, ready to ride off. He drank the wine, put the empty glass between the ears of his horse, broke it with one shot of his ...”

“... circuit – at Stockholm in 1960, where he had been introduced by the Cambridge Medieval historian Michael Postan, another Eastern European and the man who discovered Marc Bloch for English-speaking historians – ended in open conflict on the congress floor when the West Germans, led by Vittinghoff with Joseph Vogt in the background, made a ruthless attempt ...”

“... routes in Snowdonia with Mallory just before the Great War and was told by Geoffrey Winthrop Young that he had ‘the finest natural balance’ he had ever seen in a climber. At the height of his enthusiasm he wrote that climbing ‘made all other sports seem trivial’, and in Goodbye to All That he records a fine physical image of the well-being that ...”

“... critically important to a celebrated generation of Northern Irish poets, poets like Derek Mahon, Michael Longley and Muldoon. These writers were led to him by content but stayed for the style. Auden or Eliot’s influence can be overwhelming for a writer, their tone is so settled, their territory staked out so thoroughly. But a novice poet can wander around ...”

“... and passing a building site I slowed down to protect my eyes from the likelihood of grit. A young Roscommon boy asked, ‘Are you happy?’‘Not very,’ I said.He beamed at hearing a fellow countrywoman.‘Any chance of tea at four?’‘No chance,’ I said (I had to be somewhere).‘You won’t forget us, will you?’ he said.‘I won’t,’ I ...”

“... two faces, and don’t necessarily know which is the true one. Peter was then a tall, rosy-cheeked young man with blond hair flopping over his forehead, like an overgrown schoolboy, and I thought if I had been a Russian I would have been inclined to show him my dissident face, if only to avoid disappointing him. His expulsion from the Soviet Union at first ...”

“... over it effectively ceased to exist. It is true that individual politicians like Boris Johnson and Michael Gove will be pursued by some of their referendum pledges for as long as they are part of a government tasked with delivering on the result. But they have the advantage of being able to claim that the voters should judge them on their record in office, not ...”

“... music from a hundred feet above their nests among the bents. Catherine’s lyric, a blessing on a young woman ready for marriage, begins: I bathe your palms In showers of wine, In purifying fire, In the seven elements, In the juice of raspberries, In the milky honey, And I call the nine pure choice graces Into your fair fond face … There’s almost ...”

“... the literary agent, who is the dedicatee of Duffy. Harder to crack is the pseudonymous code of Michael Crichton, the omnicompetent ‘movelist’. (He is author of The Andromeda Strain, director and producer of Coma, director and scriptwriter of Westworld.) Crichton stands six feet seven inches tall. Two of his writing pseudonyms are ‘John Lange’ and ...”

“... sent to the painting’s owner. Ficino portrayed the goddess as offering to teach the difficult young man the code of Humanity. Perhaps, then, one can infer that moral allegoresis was accepted, in the owner’s circle, as an appropriate way to understand ancient myths. But neither document entitles us to assume that Botticelli had in mind as he worked any ...”

“... a flummery beyond compare, the flummery itself. I take a cab from Gatwick to London driven by a young Indian man who’s about to have an arranged marriage. The Gaelic term for an ‘arranged marriage’ is cleamhnas, and people who’ve had arranged marriages, or are merely related by marriage, are known as clownies, an idea I’m still pondering as I ...”

“... of The Birth of Israel: Myths and Realities (1987), Ilan Pappé, Yossi Amitai, Uri Bar-Joseph, Michael Cohen and Uri Milstein. In 1948 and After Morris wrote of his generation of Israeli historians: ‘Most of them, born around 1948, have matured in a more open, doubting and self-critical Israel than the pre-1967, pre-1973 and pre-Lebanon War Israel of the ...”