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“... Sophoclean lines: Creon forbade the burial of Polynices; Antigone, and Polynices’s wife Argeia, took up the body by night and put it on Eteocles’s pyre; when the guards surprised them, Argeia escaped, Antigone was captured; Creon handed her over to Haemon, with orders to kill her. But then:Haemon, in the grip of love, disregarded his father’s orders. He ...”

“... Kauffmann – a novelist as well as a film critic – originated both gabbiness and vomitous, and John Betjeman was the first and, indeed, the only person ever to use the word plung (which the OED defines as ‘a resonant noise as of a tennis racket striking a ball’ and categorises, with some understatement, as ‘rare’). In general, 1952 was a good year ...”

“... begin at under £22,000. It is worth recalling that when the great wage-inflation of the Seventies took many Labour voters into the tax net for the first time, the 1974-79 Labour Government discovered that they objected to paying higher taxes to help the worse-off. The Labour Party might find the same thing happening. They might also find that many of their ...”

“... a mention had it not been for the fact that the latest massacre – the third in as many weeks – took place near the centre of Algiers, too close to the international communications networks to be ignored. Both events, however, represent public relations disasters for their governments. Saudi Arabia, while holding executions and floggings in public to ...”

“... soldiers knocked on the door and killed her uncle, aunt and two cousins. The murders, which took place during the ferocious violence of the German retreat, seem to have been intended as a reprisal for Albert Einstein’s existence – her uncle was Einstein’s cousin. She and her twin sister, whose surname wasn’t Einstein and didn’t sound ...”

“... There are​ two portraits Roger Fenton took of himself, separated by only a year, one of them in the exhibition of his photographs of the Crimean War at the Queen’s Gallery in Edinburgh (until 26 November) and the other not. The first, from 1854, seems conventional: we see a Victorian gentleman – hair parted, beard trimmed to cover only the underside of his face, leaving the strong chin to fight its own battles – seated in a chair, his arm resting on a covered table ...”

“... Ludvig Heinrich briefly became the governor general of the islands of St Croix, St Thomas and St John, moving to the governor’s mansion in Christiansted, the seat of Danish government in the West Indies, but then, in 1788, he resigned and returned with his family to Copenhagen. Emilia Regina travelled with them, and her son followed a couple of years ...”

“... like a moth beating against a bulb, briefly altering the light. In 1832, Carlyle reviewed John Wilson Croker’s new edition of Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson, and emphasised, as Hermione Lee has noted, how biography, by recording ‘many a little Reality’, can make the reader see the world as it existed around the central figure, its depths and ...”

“... castle, thus turning its citizens into subjects of the absolutist state. In October 1632, demons took possession of a group of Ursuline nuns. Exorcists were called in, but exorcism did not drive out the demons; instead, it established a method of communicating with them. For four years the demons testified: although demons are natural liars it was maintained ...”

“... at three in the morning.’ He doesn’t show much sympathy for the victims either: ‘They killed John Lennon, so why wouldn’t they kill this loser?’ he shrugs at one point. Mendieta may have a dark sense of humour – he deflects a reporter’s questions by announcing that ‘the victim lost his life because his head got smashed in by a meteor from ...”

“... quite accepted. Lewis’s recommendation of them was a poisoned chalice for critics, since he took them as myth rather than literature, and regarded the actual words, which involve much archaism, some archness, and a tendency to capitalise Life and Love and Death, as ‘almost an accident’. Epigraphs from Goethe, Novalis, Schiller and Schleiermacher do ...”

“... with the female lead is offset only by his boundless greed; a blind judge, the famous Sir John Fielding, who is widely believed to have been deceived by the enchanting villainess, despite his legendary reputation for discerning innocence or guilt in the voices of defendants; a rich and gullible Jewish sugar-daddy who attracts hints of anti-semitism; a ...”

“... of custom and prejudice, led some men and women into a clandestine second existence where they took on roles proscribed by the conformism around them. There they indulged the pleasures of the flesh, preached hedonism, and engaged in extortion, crime and subversion – all the while planning to obtain forgiveness for their sins by way of last-minute ...”

“... in 1973 in Beijing. In 1996, she left for the US. She studied medicine at the University of Iowa, took her Master’s in immunology, worked as a research scientist, then slipped or skipped sideways and attended the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she took her MFA. She has published two books of short stories, A Thousand ...”

“... of Shuruppak in southern Iraq, who built a boat to preserve his family and the birds and beasts he took on board. The first bird released after six days of floods ‘flew to and fro but found no resting place’. The similarity between this text and the narrative of the Flood in Genesis caused a sensation after the tablet was excavated by Hormuzd Rassam at ...”