“... Ennui is French but it is related to annoy, and spree may come from Old Norse, or it may actually be French, an elision of esprit. The OED merely murmurs about the word’s ‘obscure origin’. Still, whatever their derivation, the words do seem to belong to quite different realms of affect and activity, which themselves rest on an old and interesting – if ...”

“... as often) she runs into serious trouble, implicated in a death for which, eventually, a debt must be paid. The setting is luxurious, the lifestyle hedonistic, the climate oppressively hot. Prodigious amounts of alcohol are consumed. As events accelerate towards a violent finale, the reader is kept guessing. How severe will the consequences ...”

“... of Modernism. It was this crux, de Waal suggests, that made it possible for Rie to define herself by contradistinction and find her style. She also made a break from the comfortable family life of summer holidays on her grandparents’ estate at Eisenstadt and a fully staffed household. In 1928 she commissioned Ernst Plischke to design a studio and apartment ...”

“... In​ 2015 Theresa May, who was then home secretary, announced that there would be an inquiry into undercover policing and the operation of the Metropolitan Police’s Special Demonstration Squad (SDS). This secret unit, whose purpose was to infiltrate subversive groups, was set up in 1968 as part of Special Branch in response to protests against the Vietnam War ...”

“... home, which faced the marketplace where his family were traders. I took a picture of my Star of David necklace against this backdrop, possessed by some primal, spiky urge to reinstate an ephemeral Jewish presence in this town which now has no Jewish community. I walked around the old synagogue, which has been converted ...”

“... women are in their beds, I have been perusing Argentina: The Malvinas and the End of Military Rule by Alejandro Dabat and Luis Lorenzano.* The authors are Argentine Marxists living and working in Mexico. I shall be interested to see whether the reviewer for the London Review of Books judges the work to ...”

“... Westminster. The referendum went against independence – 55 per cent to 45 – but was followed by an extraordinary upheaval, as tens of thousands of people, politically animated or re-animated by the referendum, flooded into the ‘Yes’ parties – not just the SNP but also the Scottish Greens and the Scottish ...”

“... The life​ and work of Dora Carrington have long been overshadowed by her death. As is often the way with suicides, later viewers find it hard to lose hindsight. For all the vivacity in many of her paintings, which seem to vibrate with joy in colour and form, she is often cast as a tragic figure. A less obvious factor in her relative obscurity is the obsessive cult of Bloomsbury ...”

“... and was a gateway to Arabia in the last river valley before the desert.Objects unearthed by Franco-Palestinian archaeological teams first arrived at the Institut du monde arabe for an exhibition called Gaza Méditerranéenne in 2000. By the end of that year, the period of relative calm that followed the Oslo Peace ...”

“... In​ 1888, two soon to be famous composers completed their earliest significant works. In Leipzig, where he was employed as second conductor at the Stadttheater, Gustav Mahler put the finishing touches to what would later be known as his Symphony No. 1. These days performed as a four-movement work, it received its premiere in Budapest as a five-movement ‘symphonic poem ...”

“... for their children, we guess, guessing also that this is paradise. This is the utopia projected by Chicago progressives, the lost land glimpsed in the recollections of a visitor to the newbuild quoted in the Chicago Tribune in 1958: ‘You could sit on the grass and just enjoy yourself.’ Marshall’s fantasia allows us to think: those lawns might not yet ...”

“... of the Language, published ten years on from the first, contains 53 essays and nine poems, each by a different author. The dust-jackets of both editions are almost wholly taken up, front and back, with a well-spaced parade of contributing writers’ names, and this provides a visual counterpart to something that emerges very clearly from the essays ...”

“... business: theirs was to pay and obey. Their leaders promised not to repeat their lèse-majesté. David Landes takes the story from the scholar of Islam, Michael Cook. It is, for him, a moral tale. Autocracies squeeze, steal and demean. ‘Only societies with room for multiple initiatives,’ he insists, ‘from below more than from above, can think in terms ...”

“... memoir cannot have helped, though she had meant it to ‘correct’ the view of her mother given by her sister. For one thing, it was suggested she write it after she’d impressed the audience at a PEN club memorial with her description of how moody her mother was and how frightened she had been of her. And isn’t there something fishy about the title ...”

“... bellowed about like a great calf. But it’s not long before we discover that the Fullers could be as sharp over money as Will Piper. Next June Joseph Fuller was entrusted by Turner with the task of beating down a man who wanted nine guineas for a horse, but Joseph bought the animal himself, and barefacedly informed ...”