“... manufactured by Dow in large quantities and then deployed in the firebombings of Berlin and Tokyo. Robert Neer, a historian of napalm, quotes a Japanese medical professor describing the carnage: ‘There was no one to rescue. If you touched one of the roasted bodies, the flesh would crumble in your hand. Humanity was reduced to its chemical properties, turned ...”

“... Cerdan, had died in a plane crash on 28 October 1949. They knew about her affairs with a string of young protégés, including Yves Montand. In 1952, they may have pored over photos of her wedding to Jacques Pills, a French singer and songwriter with dark matinée idol good looks. Dietrich was the matron of honour. The audience also knew that she’d been in ...”

“... saviour and leader, yet refused to reduce the size of his army. In 1817, the British officer Robert Wilson pointed out that Russia’s population had grown from 22 million to at least 42 million since 1762. In 1828, de Lacy Evans estimated that Russia’s population was 50 million and would reach 73 million in another fifteen years. Since the ...”

“... her novels from the 1970s is The Driver’s Seat (1970) – Spark’s own favourite – in which a young woman sets out to get murdered and wears a flamboyant dress so that plenty of people notice her in the moments before her death. It was in part an experiment in the nouveau roman, but it became more than that because, despite its emotionally detached ...”

“... the bodies of your friends. Jarman made a note in his diary in April 1989: ‘Since autumn: Terry, Robert, David, Ken, Paul, Howard. All the brightest and best trampled to death – surely even the Great War brought no more loss into one life in just 12 months, and all this as we made love not war.’ In March 1992: ‘We talked of the people who died of Aids ...”

“... and its allied disciplines shut up shop and go home. So we have the evolutionary anthropologist Robert Foley: ‘For centuries, humans have wondered about why humans are the way they are, and they’ve turned to philosophy and to religion to answer that question.’ But humans should stop doing that: Darwin allowed us to set philosophy and religion aside ...”

“... cyclists. Sometimes, as at the junction of Middleton Road and Kingsland Road in Hackney, a young man is dragged under those red-hubbed wheels without the driver feeling a thing. Chasing another project, Gill found himself at the corner of Whiston Road, near St Leonard’s Hospital, where cellophane bouquets were being woven into the fence. He met a ...”

“... a flannelette nightie. Did that give licence to the next day’s BBC Book Programme, opened by Robert Robinson on the proposition that ‘the judges made the wrong choice’? A ‘favourite aunt’, ‘a jam-making grandmother’, ‘Pooterish’, ‘distrait’: this is the sort of thing people wrote about the figure Fitzgerald presented, finding a ...”

“... Burundi. On the way, I’m stopped at numerous Hutu roadblocks. The barriers are manned mostly by young people with clubs, hammers or machetes. At one, a small boy is holding a nail-studded cudgel with tufts of bloody hair. The smell of putrefying bodies by the roadside is sickening. The starter of my dilapidated car is defective and the militiamen lay down ...”

“... feed – are in league with stolen, fleeting pleasures. Smith is the poet of ‘bold drops’. Robert Lowell was enthusiastic about her writing because it was ‘so unlike the usual poem trying so hard to be a poem’. In her essay ‘Simply Living’, she refers to ‘the pleasures of simplicity’ in order to make a fine distinction. ‘Enjoyment lurks ...”

“... of her career: the Autodidact of all Autodidacts. The quizzing was relentless. Had I read Robert Walser? (Ooooh errrg blush, ahem, little cough, um: No, I’m ashamed to say . . .) Had I read Thomas Bernhard? (Yes! – Yes, I have! ‘Wittgenstein’s Nephew’! Yay! Yippee! Wow! Phew! – dodged the bullet that time!) It seemed, for a while at ...”

“... suppose. One on each. Most were about Americans. A lot of presidents. Walt Disney, I remember him. Robert Oppenheimer. No, I’m joking. But Abraham Lincoln, at any rate. And when they died, no matter how, I always cried. But in a good way.’‘Because it wasn’t you!’‘No, no – it wasn’t that. It was more that they’d overcome all this injustice in ...”

“... to intimidate the heterosexual reader. Whereas most other gay novelists concentrated on the young and solitary protagonist, afraid to avow his forbidden desires, or on the gay couple (sensitive, noble, tormented), living in a forest or by the sea or in any event in romantic isolation (the alibi of love), Genet was picturing the gaudy homosexual ghetto ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... at least since the fall of Tripoli. Tha’ir can simply mean ‘agitated’ or ‘excited’. The young men who spent much of the period between April and July careering up and down the coastal highway in Toyota pick-ups (and the whole of September running backwards and forwards around Bani Walid), while firing as much of their ammunition into the air as at ...”