“... 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 ...”

“... On​ 12 December 1884, Henry James took a break from writing the novel that would be published as The Princess Casamassima and went on a research trip to Millbank Prison on the north bank of the Thames. The prison was swampy, labyrinthine and dark. In the novel, Hyacinth Robinson, an impressionable young bookbinder, goes there to visit his dying mother, whose criminal past, we soon learn, has a central role in her son’s mentality and is a cause of his undoing, as he becomes lost in a London filled with social venom and anarchist plots ...”

“... the water’ had never heard of it. Those who wanted to see it for themselves mostly took the steamer from Liverpool. The crossing is notoriously rough and lasts 11 hours, which half the boat spend knocking it back and the other half throwing it up. This leaves Belfast facing a deficit of good will and may be one reason why the city has never ...”

“... practitioners, with his own assistants, and not least with his own even more eminent brother, John. Hunter proffered a sinister materialistic explanation for the anatomists’ psychic violence: ‘the passive submission of dead bodies, their common objects, may render them less able to bear contradiction.’ No finer case exists of just that psychological ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... serious big time. And that image seemed to be confirmed, in the mid-Sixties, when Chelsea players took to hanging out in the King’s Road boutiques and hostelries of Swinging London. Chelsea’s team of that decade – the team of Venables, Tambling, Bridges and so on – was often wonderful to watch, but you could see what was meant when people sneered at ...”

“... in the world when it was wrecked in the late 16th century. The ship gave its name to Port Saint John, where it is believed to have sunk on its return from Cochin China, with a cargo of spices and china, but my friend has been picking up a quantity of cannonshot as well as pieces of willow pattern-like china. Drilling down into the sandbank at the edge of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... disappeared from Constantinople, the Danish historian J.L. Heiburg noticed the darker text and took some grainy photographs, from which he copied what he could see of the Greek through a magnifying glass. But here was the palimpsest itself, finally available for further study. The auction was fraught. Major American universities competed with ...”

“... Britain’s application for entry to the Common Market as soon as he was in Downing Street, Heath took eighteen months to negotiate terms that were satisfactory to him and to Pompidou, a period probably extended by the need for Ireland and Denmark to do the same (Norway having opted out). The arithmetic in the Commons was not unfavourable. The Tories had 330 ...”

“... and divide into two the poet and his poems. This poet, however, believed in a poetry which ‘took the whole man’, so that it is possible to propose that his poetry may have ‘taken’ the calamity of his breakdowns. ‘My mind’s not right,’ Lowell says in ‘Skunk Hour’. And the doctors could not put it right. Lowell distrusted ...”

“... not Stalinist terror, was the chief threat Russia faced. Yet Eisenhower’s secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, remained captive to the fantasy of rolling back communism in Eastern Europe rather than containing it (as Kennan had been advocating). When US propaganda outlets encouraged Hungarian dissidents to rebel against their government, then failed to ...”

“... drinking and brawling less, and reading, smoking and gambling more. Yet this ‘levelling up’ took place in a context of widespread social conservatism. If people were better-fed, the British diet was still over-refined, over-sweet and intensely unimaginative (grapefruit, one memoir recalled, was thought ‘a Babylonian touch’). They may have been ...”

“... Petersburg. Among parvenus from other parts of Europe, few did better, at least for a time, than John Law, son of an Edinburgh banker, who gained an early reputation as a reckless gambler, but also as a brilliant thinker on economic matters. A companion from the gaming tables, the French regent Philippe d’Orléans, brought him to Paris in 1715 to reform ...”