“... With an increasing number of Chinese entering South Africa, or staying on illegally, the total may now be more than 500,000. French’s anecdotal evidence adds precious insights. After working as a translator for a state-owned Chinese company in Madagascar, Zhang Yun, a member of the lower middle class back home, stayed on selling goods on a margin as a ...”

“... points’ might have. As he wrote in the characteristically self-effacing preface, ‘the subject may appear an insignificant one, but we shall see that it possesses some interest; and the maxim de minimis non curat lex [‘the law does not concern itself with trifles’] does not apply to science.’ Nor does it apply to history. In the letters of a single ...”

“... after 9/11, of America’s spirit of civic and national resolve; and, for neo-conservatives in May 2003, the spirit of the ‘motivating hopefulness of America’ when Bush was confidently declaring the end of the Iraq war. None of these readings is exactly wrong, but behind the idea that Whitman can be all things to all people lies a more productive ...”

“... journalism – he had been in Nigeria on a business trip at the time of the strike – and this may explain his failure to protect Cudlipp. But it hardly excuses it. Since his return from the war Cudlipp had raised the Pictorial’s circulation to five million (higher than the Mirror’s, another reason for Bartholomew’s hostility), and his dismissal ...”

“... and so many like it was the wartime British naval blockade of Germany. And behind the policy, Lord Robert Cecil, the maverick son of the late Victorian Conservative prime minister Lord Salisbury, and minister for blockade in Lloyd George’s wartime government. The aim of the blockade was to damage Germany’s war effort but not Britain’s relations with ...”

“... again as a world power. Henry Stimson, Roosevelt’s war secretary, took a different view. So did Robert Jackson, a Supreme Court justice, though Jackson was clear that ‘you must put no man on trial under forms of a judicial proceeding if you are not willing to see him freed if not proven guilty … the world yields no respect for courts that are organised ...”

“... of this kind was the conviction that Pound had undergone a fundamental change of heart in Pisa. Robert Fitzgerald, reviewing the Pisan Cantos in the New Republic in August 1948, was glad to find the poet ‘for the first time expressing a personal desolation and a kind of repentance’. The trick was to imagine a desolation so extreme that, whatever Pound ...”

“... in the medical term ‘proud flesh’. Therefore, whatever Shakespeare intended, the most we may reasonably argue is that both readings are possible; or to put it more strongly, that the two readings are not separable. It should be emphasised, however, that there is no evidence that anyone before 1780 ever read the word as anything but ...”

“... of ‘Architecture or Revolution’, which concludes Vers une architecture: the architect ‘may have to emulate the Futurists’ or ‘technological culture’ may ‘go on without him’. As Whiteley argues, this revision of modern architecture was not only academic: to study Futurist history was also a way for ...”

“... the plague while in Newgate. We don’t know much about what Donne did when he left university. He may have travelled abroad. A ‘Jhon Downes’ is recorded in a list of household servants of the Catholic Earl of Derby from 1587, but it’s anyone’s guess whether or not that was the poet. Donne reappears in the records when in 1592 he entered Lincoln’s ...”

“... could possibly identify. But apart from being evasive, this is inept. In the film The Fog of War, Robert McNamara presents the first of his 11 rules of war: ‘Empathise with the enemy.’ Suicide bombing kills far fewer people than conventional warfare; the reactions it provokes must, therefore, reside somewhere other than in the number of the dead. It ...”

“... Over the winter, you may have seen posters for a movie, certificate 12A (‘moderate fantasy violence and horror . . . limited bloody images’): a bunch of teenagers, Hollywood-dishy, but coloured to look like corpses, with greenish-tarnished complexions and uncanny eyes. The movie, Twilight, is about a coven of high-school vampires in the American Pacific Northwest, and is adapted from the first of a series of four novels by Stephenie Meyer; the last instalment, Breaking Dawn, came out last year ...”

“... figure of Oedipus and other paternal ghosts haunting Cocteau’s work, Arnaud speculates that he may have paid ‘with a secret guilt: as if he secretly held himself responsible for a disappearance that had opened up the favours of his mother exclusively to him’. Later in life, mother and son shared an apartment on the rue d’Anjou, with Madame ...”

“... him how to look at painting. Though still in high school, Bois is swept up by the events of May 1968, after which he connects radical art with radical politics whenever he can, an avant-garde commitment that is affirmed when he meets the Brazilian artist Lygia Clark two years later. In 1969, aged seventeen, Bois is offered an opportunity to exhibit his ...”

“... king, guided by the men, just one in a hundred, who had been blinded in only one eye (the atrocity may be authentic, but the numbers are certainly too high). It was also under Basil that the Venetians received favourable trading status in Constantinople in return for helping to supply the imperial headquarters at Bari in Puglia and policing the Adriatic ...”