“... that it is somewhat Anglocentric. The treatment of Mazzini’s early years and the foundation of Young Italy is a little sketchy, and the book only really comes to life with his arrival in England in 1837, at the age of 32. One learns rather more about his English correspondents than about his Italian ones. Still, there are compensatory rewards. Mazzini ...”

“... of a worthy but rather stodgy 1994 biography by the chemist Dietrich Stoltzenberg, whose father, Hugo, worked with Haber on poison gas. Charles is a journalist, and was drawn to Haber by way of an earlier book, Lords of the Harvest: Biotechnology, Big Money, and the Future of Food (2001). Between Genius and Genocide goes into far less detail about Haber’s ...”

“... iron, but polished and glassy around which, and reflected in the black shine, stood Emily, Hugo, Gerald, her officer father, her large laughing gallant mother, and little Denis, the four-year-old criminal clinging to Gerald’s hand.’ Another mysterious She appears and is so beautiful the iron egg breaks at her gaze, and after some hesitation She ...”

“... the throne. Though no republican himself, Hotman sketched the outlines of a republican myth that Hugo Grotius and others would develop at length. Tacitus helped them show that the constitution of the Dutch Republic – whose citizens presumably descended from the Batavi – grew from deep historical roots. Two hundred years later, Herbert Baxter Adams, the ...”

“... and ancient peasant struggles against the landlords. The process that began with the election of Hugo Chávez in Venezuela nearly ten years ago, and continued with the emergence of leftist presidents at the head of indigenous movements in Bolivia and Ecuador, may yet produce a surprise result in Paraguay’s elections. Fernando Lugo, a 58-year-old former ...”

“... that’s the enemy.’ She married Gianmartino Arconati Visconti in 1873 – Victor Hugo was one of the witnesses at the wedding. She was 33 at the time, her husband was 34. He died three years later, leaving her an immense fortune. She spent much of it on education, founding chairs at the Sorbonne and the Collège de France, buying the contents ...”

“... is one         Free in soul beneath the sun.Mazzini might die ‘chainless’, but the young poet’s sense of honour felt shackled. ‘Too long the world has waited,’ the second stanza begins, ‘Against his chain the growing thunder yearns/With hot swift pulses all the silence burns.’ In the last poem in Francis O’Gorman’s Oxford ...”

“... of which were an old man, whose name was Prospero, and his daughter Miranda, a very beautiful young lady’ – and calls it ‘proto-Hemingway’; he also claims for her prose ‘the lean authority of the Bible’. In the all too rare moments when Wilson is lost for inspiration, he resorts to dropping in big words: scesis ...”

“... almost convivial, has no pride; when we first meet him, he is described as ‘an ordinary young man, very lively and free in his manners but nothing special in him’. He is constantly paying visits in the town’s highest circles, but he has other calls to make too. At the direction of a mysterious ‘Committee’ somewhere abroad, he has set up a ...”

“... in July 1974, which were recorded and released as David Live, and in August recorded the bulk of Young Americans there with a new line-up of musicians, including Carlos Alomar on guitar. When the tour resumed in the autumn, with many of the musicians from Philadelphia now on stage, Bowie ditched the elaborate set and changed his costume, performing in his ...”

“... will drive the healthy to sex: soon after Stravinsky died Craft got married – to Stravinsky’s young nurse, an event that is just about noted (in a 1994 postscript). But the book leaves one in no doubt that Craft’s feelings for both Igor and Vera Stravinsky were of painfully acute filial love. ‘They are the most marvellous people in the world ... a ...”

“... of morbid anaesthesia. The self-absorption, the proneness to erotomanic bizarrerie, the display of young doggishness demanding to be loved, the simultaneous apathy towards the feelings of others, are reminiscent of Dylan Thomas, that other priapic show-off descending on London from an Anglo-Celtic metropolis, except that the earlier incarnation seems to have ...”

“... of motherhood and ‘my inexplicable (to him) decision to reproduce’: ‘I said that having a young child around all the time was like having a houseguest who never said anything and never left.’ She pointed out the guest’s childlike characteristics:[It is] smaller than anyone in the family … has a peculiar appearance … and does not understand ...”

“... of Johnnie Walker Black Label, smashing his head in and then cutting his throat. Accompanied by a young nephew, he decamps for Bangalore. Of course, Balram knows that his employer’s family will visit vengeance on his. But he doesn’t care. His brothers and their children may be slaughtered, the women of the family may be raped, but he is indifferent. Adiga ...”

“... neighbours are sometimes apprehensive, they are not participants in its troubles. Even President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela (about whom Richard Gott has recently written in the LRB) has done no more than strike an occasional ‘Bolivarian’ populist attitude. Few countries in the last two centuries have been as little involved as Colombia in international ...”