“... Hilliker, in 1958. In this new piece of work Ellroy offers his readers – and who knows what they may make of it? – a different kind of case history, one of compacted self-delusion, grandiosity and monstrous self-pity. Dutifully, I set to. I reread My Dark Places and once more exposed myself to the fanfaronade of his self-interrogation as he detailed the ...”

“... Sir Henry Wotton, sent a copy to James I, describing it as ‘the strangest piece of news (as I may justly call it)’ that he would ever have received ‘from any part of the world’. Most copies were probably sent over the Alps by Tommaso Baglioni, the book’s nominal publisher, or his boss, the excommunicated polemical printer Roberto Meietti, now in ...”

“... heart. Every tree, every hedge is a bouquet of blossoms and makes you want to turn into a May bug, so as to float in this sea of fragrances and draw all your nourishment from it. A May bug? Goethe’s Maienkäfer is an odd word, either an old form of Maikäfer (‘cockchafer’) or a misprint for Marienkäfer ...”

“... onwards. Second, and crucially, it severs the link with mental illness: Lullin’s eyesight may have dimmed but his cognitive faculties were perfectly sharp, and he had no difficulty recognising his hallucinations as unreal. Sacks’s boldest move is to exclude hallucinations associated with schizophrenia, on the grounds that they demand ‘separate ...”

“... to Iraq and Afghanistan … How can there be any dispute about the virtue of what he has done? … May Allah grant our brother Nidal patience, perseverance and steadfastness, and we ask Allah to accept from him his great heroic act. Awlaki was writing from Yemen, where to commend an attack on American soldiers as they prepare for deployment in Muslim ...”

“... have served during the conquest of Britain under Claudius nearly twenty years earlier. His face may not be the most prepossessing – he had a small chin and protruding ears – but it did belong to him alone. The stone was commissioned, not unusually, by the centurion’s grateful freedmen, or ex-slaves, Verecundus and Novicius. The first ‘securely dated ...”

“... tentatively, allowing his idol and besotted patron first dibs on divining the future – which may prove to be less golden than the sun’s shafts seem to promise. What if the guide has lost his touch, can no longer read the entrails? Speer’s detachment and poised ambiguity were not entirely affectations. He was a provincial snob who regarded ...”

“... brats. ‘She had 2 Bastards, others say Three,’ Pope adds in a manuscript comment that he may have had from the struggling poet and hellraiser Richard Savage. In typically tantalising style, Curll alleged in print that the ill-matched babes were ‘Offspring of a Poet and a Bookseller’. The first task for any Haywood biographer, plainly, is to clear ...”

“... tolerance and language fluency. Although he responded to each test as if it were his first, he may have developed a vague undertow of déjà vu; he once remarked to a researcher with characteristic drollery: ‘You just live and learn. I’m living, you’re learning.’ Yet some aspects of his inner life remained mysterious. Did he, for example, remember ...”

“... people to haul loads. A single horse can exert enough force to pull up to thirty tonnes. This may seem astonishing and incredible, but it is really quite simple. Wheels are very well made and roads are well surfaced. Anyone acquainted with contemporary Japan’s superb public transport network may be surprised that ...”

“... That union causes the first conflict in the history of the universe. Afraid that his children may succeed him, Heaven tries to keep them inside Earth’s body, an ‘evil act’ which is met with ‘an evil plan’. Earth manufactures a sickle, arms her unborn son Kronos, and makes him castrate his father. Kronos eventually becomes the ruler of the ...”

“... to destitution. James Mangan – ‘Clarence’ was a later addition – was born in Dublin on 1 May 1803, ‘amid scenes of blasphemy and riot’, if we are to credit a fragment of autobiography he wrote in the last months of his life. As epigraph to that bizarre document, Mangan quoted two lines he claimed to have found in Philip Massinger, though no one ...”

“... has an intrinsic or a purely instrumental value. For much conservative thought, democracy may have its uses, but it is hardly a good in itself. Better for a single sovereign to reach the right decision than for a sovereign people to botch the business. And though democracy may thrive in English soil, it ...”

“... he is not ‘a highbrow with intellectual leanings’ but ‘a simple, rather stupid man’. This may have been said only to outbid Elspeth Huxley in a modesty contest, but he could sometimes be genuinely overawed by the company. Arriving at a very grand luncheon party, he saw ‘ten sophisticated guests assembled’ and would have bolted had his wife not ...”

“... parades never seem to get rained on. Even literary critics, who will naturally feel flattered, may wonder what the value of this parallel creation might be to or in the world. Butler answered this question only later, by means of her most famous concept, ‘performativity’. According to this, to play self-consciously and theatrically with identity, as a ...”