“... train or ship. If there was something of Baudelaire about Larbaud, there was also a touch of Terry-Thomas. Larbaud’s best-known work is probably the novel Fermina Marquez, about a Colombian beauty who sows sentimental-erotic havoc among the students at a boys’ boarding school – the missing link, one might say, between The Red and the Black and The ...”

“... when Natalya Goncharova and Pushkin were betrothed she ‘gave him her cold timid hand’. This is more plausible than St John of the Cross biting his lip: a formal betrothal would have involved the extending of hands and made most girls timid, while Moscow in April would have made their hands cold. It is not a banal comment. Though there is a suitable ...”

“... and southern Holland in the event of a German attack on those countries – an operation which had more to be said for it at that time than in the changed circumstances of May 1940. The British tamely accepted French plans which they were subsequently to blame for the disaster. Moreover, few British officers expressed any doubts about the efficiency and ...”

“... often do’. He was also very conscious that the age-gap between himself and the Commando HQ was more than ten years. ‘They needed to have confidence in my judgment, confidence which could not be risked by my revealing too many reservations, or seeking too much reassurance.’ At a critical stage the colonel had the opportunity to pull back his ...”

“... economic oppressiveness of the Church, and a mediating priesthood: laymen had a right to preach. More positively, Menocchio accepted a sort of materialist pantheism, such as was to be reproduced in mid-17th-century England by Ranters and Gerrard Winstanley. ‘Everything that can be seen is God ... We are gods.’ Menocchio had a wide tolerance and was ...”

“... visas to the US and put pornographic drawings in his suitcases to distract the police from the more dangerous illicit documents they contained. He walked free from the Gestapo headquarters in Biarritz by following a high-ranking officer straight out of the building. Arriving in Lisbon, he was intrigued to see a poster advertising a concert by Lillian ...”

“... of English border castles and towers. In Northumberland, James awaited the English army, led by Thomas Howard, Earl of Surrey. Though apparently possessing advantages in ground, equipment and supplies, James allowed himself to be outmanoeuvred by Surrey, who cut off the Scottish army’s route north, forcing it to move to Branxton Hill, where its cannon ...”

“... incarcerated in Spandau because he was guilty of a passion for Doric columns, while the far more destructive Wernher von Braun was judged useful enough to be whisked to comfortable exile in the US. Speer’s projects continue, not unlike sex for the virgin, to be the object of pseudo embarrassment for architects … The inability to deal with the ...”

“... Matthew Arnold wrote in 1887: ‘Its one great fault is that it is feather-brained.’ Wilde was more scathing: ‘The public have an insatiable curiosity to know everything, except what is worth knowing. Journalism, conscious of this, and having tradesman-like habits, supplies their demands.’ Desperate for scoops and hikes in circulation, the papers went ...”

“... summer, began by placing him in the capacious context of such postwar avant-garde novelists as Thomas Bernhard, José Saramago and David Foster Wallace, only to acknowledge that, despite a shared affinity for ‘very long, breathing, unstopped sentences’, Krasznahorkai was ‘perhaps the strangest’ of them. The writer is ‘peculiar’; his work is ...”

“... the historians he supervised to take an interest in developments in anthropology and sociology. More than anyone else, he was responsible for challenging the notion that the Ottoman period was a dark age of political and cultural stagnation for the Arabs. In his later writings he also increasingly queried the notion that the recent history of the Arabs had ...”

“... I read Slaughterhouse-Five right after Breakfast of Champions, and then, feeling I should be more methodical, picked up Vonnegut’s first book, Player Piano, and read his work in order, filling in the handful of library gaps with my pocket money at the Waldenbooks in my local mall. Later, I’d start a rock band and name it Ice-Nine, after the ...”

“... what at first appears a straightforward project: to trace the path followed by English law for more than a millennium in categorising, criminalising and penalising treasonable acts. They conclude that treason as a crime has had its day: ‘Today, dangers inherent in the prosecution of treason manifestly outweigh the advantages, and the absurdity of a ...”

“... According to the charter, ‘any attack on the sovereignty and territorial integrity of one or more contracted parties will be considered an aggression against the other parties.’ But there isn’t going to be a war, or at least not the Ecowas invasion of Niger that Tinubú was talking up in August. For one thing, it would have to be fought almost ...”

“... strange, but it reflects sophisticated evolutionary interplay. C0-operative breeding allows for more consistent protection of nests, reducing predation, and increases the resources chicks have access to, vastly improving chances of fledgling survival. The benefits are so great that, about 15 per cent of the time, anis will lay an egg in another group’s ...”