“... over. A priestess stood by, holding a little wooden image of the goddess, who was identified with savage Artemis. If the whipping was too restrained and not enough blood was spattering her altar, Artemis would grow impossibly heavy until the floggings improved. In Roman times a theatre was built so that tourists could watch the event. Among those who came was ...”

“... a back seat. The first lengthy testimony in the book comes from two men on that committee, Robert Vázquez-Pacheco and Moisés Agosto-Rosario, and shows how much autonomy could exist within the organisation. Vázquez-Pacheco, a Black Puerto Rican born in New York City, made the transition from audience member at meetings to visibility in the simplest ...”

“... and privilege meet. This book has several faults but at least one great merit: Arthur Gold and Robert Fizdale have seen that Misia’s personality, even if it can never quite be captured, remains highly interesting for the light it casts on how talent can cohabit with gracious living and yet still keep its distance. Misia features a good deal of ...”

“... inspired simpleton, a great big silly goose’. He makes a memorable entrance as Stephen Savage in Christopher Isherwood’s thinly fictionalised novel Lions and Shadows (1938): ‘He burst in upon us, blushing, sniggering loudly, contriving to trip over the edge of the carpet – an immensely tall, shambling boy of 19, with a great scarlet ...”

“... Sea, to their home in the west.’ Spenser relates the same history but degrades it by listing the savage customs derived by the Irish (who are Scots) from Scythia.Much has been written about what the View of the Present State of Ireland tells us about the Irish, who threatened Spenser’s estate in County Cork and later burned down his castle, but little ...”

“... easy to exaggerate the international power of the Jews,’ the Foreign Office Under-Secretary Lord Robert Cecil said. Segev quotes a character in The Thirty-Nine Steps airing the common prejudice that ‘the Jew is everywhere . . . He’s the man who is ruling the world just now.’ Although Zionist leaders could turn these anti-semitic notions to their own ...”

“... as the unlikely heroes of French history.In The Subversive Simone Weil: A Life in Five Ideas, Robert Zaretsky sets out to show that Weil’s ideas can still ‘resonate’ with secular readers today. He wants us to learn from Weil, but he also thinks that, undiluted, she is likely to send us running. His solution is to tone her down. The value of ...”

“... democracy created after Germany’s defeat in 1918 which lasted until Hitler murdered it in 1933? Robert Gerwarth’s book adds to the recent revisions of Weimar by historians out to rescue that particular Germany from popular and international cliché. He refuses to see it as a state doomed from the start by inflation, violence and the collapse of moral ...”

“... and the other artists who could be considered Yiddish modernists – the painters Nathan Altman, Robert Falk and, for a time, El Lissitzky, the composers Lev Pulver and Moshe Milner, the writer who called himself Der Nister – were defined by the struggle to integrate these two tendencies. ‘Our first imprimatur is our modernism, our leftism and our ...”

“... half-leopard’ and Arnaud suggests that most of Cocteau’s lovers ‘would have a savage, animalistic touch of Nijinsky about them’. The famous scandal of the ballet’s première was partly plotted by the ringmaster himself, Diaghilev. The audience laughed, booed, hissed; ladies cried out during the obscene dances, while, from the ...”

“... of The Magic Flute (all of this under the auspices of the American director Peter Sellars). Robert Lowell meant to write a libretto and duly boned up with intensive attendance at the New York Met, but never delivered. John Ashbery has not, so far as I know, produced a libretto – only the poem, ‘Syringa’, specially composed for a setting by Elliott ...”

“... governor of East Africa conceded that what began as a ‘locally limited rebellion by a few half-savage tribes’ eventually turned ‘into a kind of national struggle against foreign rule’. Sometimes German policies could create new identities, as in Rwanda, where colonial officers armed with ethnographic manuals turned loose social differentiations ...”

“... ogling chinless face, his scimitar-like mouth with its rows of gleaming teeth, the relentless and savage fury with which he attacks, the rage of his thrashing when caught …And so on. Yet shark attacks are an exotic rarity. There were 75 verified shark attacks last year, and 12 fatalities. Even in the US, a global hotspot, you are forty times more likely to ...”

“... into transcendental meditation and gets written up as a Muscovite avatar of a character out of Robert Stone or Joan Didion: Often silences fell between us. Much of the time I felt that she was not in my company at all, nor I in hers. She would close her eyes for long, still minutes, smiling crookedly … I don’t know how she conceived of me. She only ...”

“... to them in Shakespeare or Milton or Macaulay than by reading approved ‘left-wing’ authors. Robert Blatchford’s socialist newspaper, the Clarion, was truer to working-class experience than Fabian pamphlets: Blatchford realised, as Rose puts it, that the Labour Party’s ‘doctrinal texts were nothing less than the whole canon of classic ...”