“... two female striped hyenas for the museum’; they are kept in the guest house and have ‘a strong, musky smell’. Two days later: ‘The hyenas are smelling worse and worse … Griaule dreamed that his bed was full of snakes (by association with the smell of the snake house at the Jardin des Plantes).’ The thought of France is never far away: both a ...”

“... plausible military scenarios. In The Guns of Navarone, a team of crack saboteurs led by Major Roy Franklin (Anthony Quayle) makes its way across a notional Aegean island towards a fortress which houses deep within it a battery of big guns. Franklin breaks a leg and has to be left behind, so the rather more wolfish Captain Keith Mallory (Gregory ...”

“... the innocent from oppression or therefore from unjust administrative sanctions: to do that, strong procedural controls are needed. But by shutting out every forensic use of incriminating answers obtained under legal compulsion, however careful and controlled the procedure by which they have been obtained, it protects the guilty from conviction. Even ...”

“... within the hour. Drive to the frontier; he might still escape.’ It was Rica. As their son, Roy, tells it in his memoir, Balkan Blue, Robinhastily packed two suitcases, collected his important papers, kissed his wife and sleeping daughters goodbye and slipped out of the back door from the block of flats into the empty street. There were a few agonising ...”

“... or team seems to acquire an aura of self-assurance that transmits itself to supporters, fuelling a strong conviction that things are going to turn out for the best. This sense of conviction then reinforces the confidence of the players in their own abilities, appearing to create for a while a virtuous circle of infallibility in which nothing can, and therefore ...”

“... Sir John Day and Sir Archibald Levin Smith, both from the High Court: ‘Unionists to a man,’ as Roy Jenkins describes them in his Life of Gladstone. But what were these judges thinking of, presiding over a tribunal to which none of the ordinary rules applied, set up for a manifestly political purpose – namely, to add a veneer of judicial legitimacy to a ...”

“... the gourmet history of cuisine is far from the methods of the Annales historians themselves (Le Roy Ladurie, for example, on famine, amenorrhea and wet nurses); and furthest of all from Lucien Febvre, who inspired a whole school of studies not of sumptuary cuisine but of popular consumption, of the distinct culinary, linguistic and vegetable regions of ...”

“... on such matters. Dr Stevenson is amply equipped with academic snaffles and bits, but instead of Roy Campbell’s ‘bloody horse’ one encounters a beast rather too close for comfort to Gradgrind’s graminivorous quadruped. The book is stuffed with Statistics, and Facts about Acts and Commissions and Surveys and Boards and Plans. It suffers, I am ...”

“... Middle Ages; it is also shown in other countries. For instance, the community which Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie revealed in Montaillou seems in this sense to have been individualist. The peasants there hoped to put together enough resources to set up a family home: if not, they stayed in service – in some ways, freer and more irresponsible, but with this ...”

“... years and showed that after the ‘rivers of blood’ speech of l968 Powell developed an immensely strong and loyal constituency, so much so that in answer to the question ‘Who would you like to see as prime minister?’ Powell was effectively treated by voters as a third party leader. Normally, when asked this question, British voters name either the actual ...”

“... years ago. ‘What comes by birth and can’t be cast off by dying – that is caste,’ Arundhati Roy describes it in an essay introducing B.R. Ambedkar’s 1930s classic, The Annihilation of Caste: What we call the caste system today is known in Hinduism’s founding texts as varnashrama dharma or chaturvarna, the system of four varnas. The approximately ...”

“... utterly obvious to the reader every time his name is mentioned, but it passes Emma by. That was a strong enough reason for Austen to break one of her unwritten rules about naming. Some fictional names are filled with semantic clues about the nature of their owners: you know that someone called Gradgrind will not be an advocate of child-centred learning, and ...”

“... Soumission is too ambiguous to be read as satire – or, for that matter, as nightmare. There are strong indications, both in the novel and in interviews, that Houellebecq sees Islam as a solution, if not the solution, to the crisis of French civilisation. Yes, civilisation, that word evocative of the longue durée, religion, tradition, shared values and, not ...”

“... college graduates and school teachers, were consigned to work as cleaners.Delmont makes a strong case that the unheralded work to which Blacks were assigned proved essential to Allied victory. Without the labour of thousands of Black troops removing mines, repairing railroad tracks and delivering food, ammunition, fuel and other supplies, the army ...”

“... died in 1892, and she outlived him by forty years. Lady Gregory made herself useful to Yeats, as Roy Foster shows in his biography of the poet, because of her interest in folklore and her knowledge of the area around Coole and its people. ‘John Synge, I and Augusta Gregory, thought/All that we did, all that we said or sang/Must come from contact with the ...”