“... friend: ‘The spirits of my African ancestors were there. I could feel them and they really took hold of me . . . I could see them moving about . . . Yes, it was deep, man . . . I just let the spirits take hold of me . . . But you know, I expect people to respect me. What I do demands so much of me that they must respect what I do.’ It turns ...”

“... resemblance to Monica Lewinsky). They shot his three bodyguards dead, set fire to his home and took him to a safe house from which he was allowed to phone a TV station in order to call on Maliki not to attack the Mehdi Army. Why did the Iraqi army fail? Training a new army has been at the centre of British and American policy for the last four years. At ...”

“... invited him back to their hotel for ‘a little private party’. Beg declined, so the players took him anyway – according to Beg – dislocating one of his arms in the process. At the hotel, Beg recounted later, the cricketers doused him with water and forced him to swig some whisky. Not until a team of Pakistani cricketers heard about Beg’s ordeal ...”

“... enter Gaza to 34 – flour but not yeast, sugar but not coffee or tea. (‘Pasta,’ a querulous John Kerry asked senior Israeli officials after visiting Gaza, ‘what’s wrong with pasta?’) The shortages were biting, particularly after Israel destroyed or damaged tens of thousands of homes, schools and government buildings in its 22-day campaign last ...”

“... via the Egyptian capital of Alexandria and Syrian Antioch. Back in her home town she took up with another rising political star, Justinian, the nephew and adopted son of the then emperor, Justin. This time the pair did marry, but only after Justin’s disapproving wife had died and the elderly emperor was persuaded to change the law to allow ...”

“... too passive and nationalistic. His frenetic, channel-surfing 28-minute collage of digital imagery took in Japanese Pepsi commercials and experimental theatre. The New York Times obituary of Paik, who died in January 2006, described him as a ‘prophet’ of video art; his predictions of a mass media age seem extraordinary today. In a 1974 essay based on his ...”

“... Wortley Montagu’s letters are an early example of a rare source: first-hand information. She took the line – which was to become common among travellers – that harem days were more humdrum, the emotions more ordinary and the life more open and pleasant than Europeans imagined. But the harems of fact (and even Lady Mary’s account was not untouched ...”

“... gives a voice to a group who are not generally believed to have (or to be entitled to) one, while John Conroy’s account is that of a sympathetic outsider nervously learning the codes and concerns of a small Catholic community at the eye of the storm. At the academic level, the heightened interest in Irish history in England has found a focus in the dynamic ...”

“... began to follow the first GCSE courses under the National Curriculum, the Education Minister John Patten infuriated the teaching profession by announcing an immediate review of the Statutory Order for English. No sooner had the review been announced than Mr Patten and his fellow ministers did their best to pre-empt its outcome. They let it be known that ...”

“... the most written about poet of our time – over three thousand items, Pierre Joris reckons. John Felstiner’s book is of inestimable value to anyone wanting to read Celan with understanding. It provides a sort of triple deal, giving a rudimentary narrative of the life, and combining this with translations and brilliant readings of maybe four or five ...”

“... know any other.’ He was not much good at sharing either, as Howard Koch, Herman Mankiewicz, John Houseman and others discovered to their cost. ‘Orson’s concern was entirely for Orson,’ Joan Fontaine, his co-star in Jane Eyre, remembers. James G. Stewart, the veteran dubbing mixer on Citizen Kane, describes what it was like to work with ...”

“... La mimica degli antichi (1832)... to the more casual observations of foreign travellers like John Evelyn, who recorded at least one insulting gesture (biting the finger) which the two lexicographers missed. In the second place, Italian judicial archives often note the gestures of insult leading to cases of assault and battery, and (among other ...”

“... to the west. Dalrymple’s exasperation found an outlet in two public letters he wrote against John Hawkesworth, Cook’s editor; and of Cook himself, he observed: ‘I cannot admit of a Pope in Geography or Navigation.’ Williams takes these passions seriously because in them he detects the source of Cook’s odd behaviour before his death in Hawaii. It ...”

“... Mark Griffiths: his elaborately illustrated essay, ‘Face to Face with Shakespeare’, focused on John Gerard’s well-known Elizabethan manual of botany, The Herball or, General Historie of Plantes, and purported to demonstrate that one of the four seemingly allegoric figures on its ornamental title-page – a figure clad in a Roman costume and crowned with ...”

“... one suspects, very much worse than death in the mind of the ageing Eurosceptic Tory. We know who John Gielgud was – the greatest English speaker of his generation, the lyre of English verse – but his letters tell a story of who he was underneath all that, or perhaps because of being all that. At 23, we find him writing to his mother from Newcastle about ...”