“... was ‘Rats on the Waterfront’, the mother of all New York rat pieces, by the great reporter Joseph Mitchell: The brown rat is hostile to other kinds; it usually attacks them on sight. It kills them by biting their throats or by clawing them to pieces, and, if hungry, it eats them … All rats are vandals, but the brown is the most ruthless … Now and ...”

“... The woods around London offered some curious sights in the 1840s. To the north in Epping Forest the infant William Morris could be seen riding out in a toy suit of armour, while down in Surrey, in the Tillingbourne Valley, little Gertrude Jekyll was learning to make gunpowder. In the event it was Morris who became the political revolutionary and Gertrude Jekyll who withdrew into a secluded world of romance in the house and garden she created at Munstead Wood ...”

“... herself barred from most of the best hotels in Europe. Ava Gardner had a lot of fun. She came from North Carolina, the last of six children in a poor farming family. Discovered when her photograph was spotted in a New York photo-store window (it had been taken by the store’s manager, Larry Tarr, who was the boyfriend of Ava’s older sister), she was ...”

“... of geography. About the time that Kant was writing, the great representative experiment on the North American continent set out to demonstrate that size did not matter. Properly constituted, a state didn’t need to accommodate itself to geography, because properly constituted, a government could represent anywhere, and, as it eventually turned ...”

“... with Cyprus, which Turkey invaded in 1974, forcing the Greek-Cypriots to flee their homes in the north of the island; 44 years later they are still waiting to return. The YPG promises to fight a guerrilla war to resist such ethnic cleansing and make the life of the Turkish forces in Afrin ‘an ongoing nightmare’. But this sounds like bravado. The Kurdish ...”

“... one of the few invented details in the closely researched local colour which Flaubert used for his North African setting, is both a named people among others, though not like the others historically attested, and through its unusual and unlocalised name, a vaguely universal type of humanoid untouchable, in something like the way in which the Yahoos both evoke ...”

“... on wherever that was. The leather cover of the address book was made in the Mugello, a valley north of Florence that my parents had visited every year since the mid-1960s. The aspect of the writer’s life that perhaps meant most to him was that time was his own, so he could go to the Apennines for two months every year if he chose to. And so he did: and ...”

“... notion of a filmic écriture – which is evidence more of how Film Studies are going in North America than of how the cinema has affected writing in France since 1900. The other art which is sold short is architecture, which has a stronger presence in this History as a metaphor, in Renaissance chapters on the ‘textual architecture’ of Rabelais ...”

“... types: the Huichol are taciturn inhabitants of the high desert of the Sierra Madre Occidental in North-West Mexico, celebrated in anthropological literature for an annual journey to obtain the hallucinogenic peyote cactus for their shamanic rites, long in contact with and resistant to Christian influence; while the Panare are genial ...”

“... of 100,000 uplifting exhibits, and then, spurning the paltry pleasures of the capital, travel back north on the next night train, thus losing only one day’s wages and saving the expense and indignity of Cockney lodgings. This decent fellow could also qualify for an unadvertised experience, rendered possible by teamwork on the part of Science, Art and ...”

“... in Damascus produced paper referred to later in Europe as charta damascena. By the 11th century, North African mills were producing paper in Fez, the delay perhaps owed to the sustained dominance of parchment in a herding society. Europe, as Kurlansky enjoys repeating, was slow to the paper party, but by the 13th century, the Italian mountain town of ...”

“... banal, the trivial with the fundamental. A favourite author of his, the botanist and Sinologist Joseph Rock, is the subject of one of the book’s finest pieces – a nostalgic pilgrimage to the remote part of the China which Rock had made his own. Chatwin quotes with delight from his deadpan prose: A short distance beyond, at a tiny temple, the trail ...”

“... need drives themto recruit in our German war,the Boche attacking by lake and landfrom the North, long lines of porterscarrying munitions on their heads,dying in a two-thirds majorityover the whites, their only democracy.It’s unjust, but they’re not ready for any other.As Miss Marguerite Roby said in her recent book:‘It is conceivable that the ...”

“... corporal’ Tito, stories of life under the Ottoman sultan, the Austrian emperor Franz Joseph, one Montenegrin and two Serbian dynasties, and the Germans, Hungarians and Italians in the Second World War sounded like exotic tales from a distant past. Yet now the members of my generation, exiles and refugees across five continents, share a not ...”

“... Somerleyton, his ticket satchel slung about him. Later, in a section on the Belgian Congo linking Joseph Conrad (who improved his English by reading the Lowestoft newspapers) with Roger Casement (whom Conrad much admired for his integrity), Sebald remarks on the ‘distinctive ugliness’ of Belgium and the stunted growth of its inhabitants. On one visit to ...”