“... a saviour could deliver the Congolese from oppression. Born in 1889, he attracted a following as a young man by performing miracles; an elderly Kimbanguist told Van Reybrouck that Kimbangu had made his hunchback disappear. Kimbangu’s rhetoric had a powerful messianic streak; he spoke of a time when ‘the whites shall be black and the black shall be ...”

“... Duhauttoir; Françoise herself lent Danton some of the purchase price. A 1964 biographer, Robert Christophe, speculated that Françoise may have had a child by Danton, and that he paid an inflated price to settle his obligations. He certainly drew on the dowry for his upcoming marriage to Gabrielle Charpentier, whose father was a tax official and the ...”

“... both were working for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), predecessor of the CIA. Both were young, separated by the war from their wives, and loved intelligence work. Both met, liked and became friends with Kim Philby, who was then working for the SIS. When Angleton and Scott met him, Philby had been a penetration agent for the Russians for a decade. He ...”

“... element of stoic indifference.’People leave places for different reasons. In Ramsay’s poem, a young man is leaving both his West Highland home and his girl behind, perhaps because he intends to join the British army or navy. In Nicol’s painting, the couple are migrants reluctantly quitting the old world for the new, perhaps because their landlord has ...”

“... whose executives knew very well they were flooding the market with a highly addictive substance. Young people used to pilfering a Xanax from their parents’ medicine cabinet or sharing out an Adderall prescription at a party were now taking a much more dangerous drug. People who had occasionally taken a stray Percocet or Vicodin from a friend who had had ...”

“... genius seems to have been first sparked by reading a good though now mostly forgotten book, Robert Currie’s Genius (1974), which analysed with panache the Romantic invention of the phenomenon and its diverse aftermath in 20th-century avatars such as Samuel Beckett and Adolf Hitler. The lonely artist inhabits a superior aesthetic realm, Currie ...”

“... these antique grounds. Income tax was reintroduced in the early 1840s by the Tory prime minister Robert Peel, who argued that a modest levy would actually help protect property from more severe despoliation in difficult times. Once the danger was past, it could be repealed, as Peel proposed to do after three years. Of course, all times can feel like ...”

“... The older workers wanted to take redundancy. The stagers didn’t. As Albertina says, they were a young department. They didn’t want to spend the next thirty years on the dole. Management claimed they were pitching for new business, but many suspected the yard was earmarked for closure.A strike was called on 28 June. When management threatened to tug the ...”

“... Rania was always making cakes and bringing them in for the staff and she got to know the other young mothers. As well as befriending Naseem she was close to another mother from the tower, Munira, who lived on the fifth floor. It was a strong Muslim community: many were from the Middle East, but a sizeable number were from Morocco, and some of the local ...”

“... to be Edwardian. Hanoi is almost entirely Jules Ferry. It is strange in Hong Kong to meet young girls being girlish in the manner of 1900, and in Hanoi to hear Frenchmen airing ideas about colonial development etc which are audacious in the manner of Rudyard Kipling.’ But Hanoi was at least pretty, with streets radiating from a lake surrounded with ...”

“... at Sobibor on 9 July 1943. Gunther fell between the stools of eligibility for reparations: too young for a profession, he couldn’t get reparations for his career being interrupted; being between high school and university when the war began, he couldn’t argue that his studies had been interrupted.My grandmother never quite believed that her daughter ...”

“... losing face, being deep or superficial – get brought back weirdly to life.) The historian Robert Stradling pointed out some time ago that during the 44 years of Philip’s reign there was not a single day of peace; and most of the wars were far from being triumphs. This may be relevant.We might compare the lost face of Mars with that in another ...”

“... of the Master’s study. Speaking by telephone from London, Roussel urged his agent to fob off the young poet with the comment that ‘Il ne se classe lui-même dans aucune école.’ Until almost the end of his life Roussel lived in a world that no other artist was either wealthy or neurotic enough to experience. ‘No author has been, or can ever be greater ...”

“... life he had had, what kind of person he was. You lose the pattern, losing a parent when you’re young. I also felt the wish to speak to him or in some way to have a relationship with him. And those poems probably come from an impulse of that sort, from the delayed pain or loss.Were you close to your siblings, not necessarily as a consequence of this, but ...”

“... same name. A stage version of this ruminative two-hander – a discussion of unhappiness between a young housemaid-cum-nanny and a middle-aged travelling salesman, who get talking on a bench in a quiet Paris square – had been cruelly panned four months earlier: Le Monde’s review had begun by saying that to encourage plays like this would drive theatre to ...”