“... by her 12-year-old daughter) to be close to her son. When they met in 1917, Lewis was a young 18, she a handsome 45. They formed a close attachment whose exact character remains a matter of speculation, but the relationship, whatever it was, was only intensified by Paddy’s death in action in 1918. Mrs Moore began to take lodgings wherever Lewis ...”

“... opposing elements – pacifists and fire-eaters, reformers and die-hards, rich and poor, old and young. When they meet each other they generally make friends, and when they make friends they can find some of the solutions to their problems.’ In Nancy’s view, there could be no harm in inviting Ribbentrop for musical chairs, because there was no chance ...”

“... Perhaps more than any other agency, it was Hollywood that defined those decades for people too young to know them. The American experience became the way the 1920s were remembered, even though only a tiny proportion of the world’s population in 1925 drank hard liquor out of teapots in speakeasies; or danced – danced, danced, danced! – often in a ...”

“... Sisi’s security apparatus merely refashions it to deflect blame. Shaimaa el-Sabbagh, a young mother and poet, was gunned down by police on 25 January 2014, the third anniversary of the start of the revolution; she had been walking unarmed through central Cairo clutching a bouquet of flowers, which she had intended to lay in Tahrir Square. The ...”

“... Commission for the loss of human property. What’s harder to measure, as the historian David Richardson noted, is the sheer ‘utility or pleasure’ Bristolians derived from the consumption of slave-produced sugar and snuff.As Hazel V. Carby writes in Imperial Intimacies, it was not just traders who profited from slavery. Residents working on the ...”

“... mining one of the few careers available to the Basotho people. In an anonymous poem from 1998, a young man describes crossing the river to South Africa in search of work in the mines. Cannibals (lelimo) are waiting for him. According to the historian David Coplan, lelimo referred to the earth into which you descended as ...”

“... his mother’s bed. Pico was a child prodigy in Latin and Greek, with a miraculous memory. As a young teen he went to Bologna to study canon law, and then roved the university towns of Italy and France seeking ever more esoteric knowledge. In Padua, he learned Hebrew and the philosophy of Averroes from the Jewish scholar Elia del Medigo. In Rome, he studied ...”

“... These include local Labour and Tory MPs. One man, however, makes no protest: the paid informer David Bertlestein, source of several scandalous allegations against Stalker, who died of a heart attack in Preston prison in March 1985. Asked after his reinstatement about the strange circumstances surrounding his case, John Stalker is understandably ...”

“... draw well. Mark Rothko has ‘severe limitations as a draughts man’, as does Milton Avery; David Smith is ‘very uneven’, Magritte straightforwardly poor. Hughes’s tendency to argue both sides achieves poignancy in his famous, and well-deserved, attack on Julian Schnabel: ‘in Schnabel,’ he charges, ‘our time of insecure self-congratulation ...”

“... stay in London thirty years ago, there is an interesting exchange with the psychiatrist David Cooper. Sinclair: It seems to me that what has emerged from this Congress [the Dialectics of Liberation] is the necessity for what has been described as madness – as one of the few active means of keeping society alive ... Cooper: Yes, I think we’ve ...”

“... and that the offender would be sacked. That’s the language of the new Fleet Street tycoons. David Astor, the former editor of the Observer, wrote in a letter to the Times: ‘To allow a newspaper catering to political sector X of our community to be taken over by a proprietor who is a militant member of political sector Y is, plainly, not in the ...”

“... study of the Free State, King Leopold’s Ghost, and Neal Ascherson’s The King Incorporated. David Van Reybrouck’s enormous history is the latest addition to this literature. Van Reybrouck is a Dutch-speaking Belgian journalist whose father was working as an electrical engineer in Katanga at the time of Moïse Tshombe’s secessionist uprising in ...”

“... the economy bags.’‘Someone came in on Christmas Eve and asked for banana leaves,’ the keen young product manager over in fruit and vegetables told me, ‘and you know something? We had them.’You would have to say that Sainsbury’s is amazing. It has everything – 50 kinds of tea, 400 kinds of bread, kosher chicken schnitzels, Cornish pilchards ...”

“... had to check,’ she said. Listening to her talk of her fears about Iraq and compare the loss of young men to the devastations of the First World War, my eye fell on an open bible next to her. The passage was from Luke: ‘Many have undertaken to draw up an account of the things that have been fulfilled among us, just as they were handed down to us by those ...”

“... their leopard spots, lay grounded as numb as scrolls of candied grapefruit peel. I saw myself as a young newt, neurasthenic, scarlet and wild in the wild coffee-coloured water. (‘Dunbarton’) This curves – scrolls – with animation. It easily – almost naturally – encompasses the contradictory pairings of ‘umber yellow’ and ...”