“... at the least, forced to convert to Christianity. By the end of August, Jews had been attacked in more than 70 Iberian towns and cities, and eliminated by conversion or massacre from many of them. One survivor described what had happened in the margins of a Torah scroll he rescued from the ruins of his father’s synagogue: Wail, holy and glorious Torah, and ...”

“... to this book a disorder traditionally linked with the cities of the West is now spreading in the more developed parts of the Third World. Yet gout seems never to be discussed in television’s endless medical programmes. No bad-tempered old men on gout-carriages are to be seen clamouring for attention in our casualty wards, or writhing in front of those ...”

“... model can persist or revive are exceptional. They will remain exceptional, even when there is far more scope for brigandage than for centuries, in a millennium that begins with the weakening or even the disintegration of modern state power, and the general availability of portable, but highly lethal, means of destruction to unofficial groups of armed men. In ...”

“... was certainly very much there in spirit, partly due to the acting of Kean and Mrs Siddons, but more to the political ferment and cultural turbulence of the age itself, with its war of competing national images and ideologies in the aftermath of victorious foreign war, its personal rivalries, fluctuating prosperity and burgeoning inequality, all of which ...”

“... The first and heaviest blows had fallen on the Regular Army, which suffered casualties of more than 50 per cent in the battles of 1914. Yet the decimation of the Old Contemptibles never became central to the war’s legend. For the original British Expeditionary Force was Kipling’s Army: half of it had been permanently abroad, its numbers were ...”

“... Poole’s The Unknown Virginia Woolf (1978), the picture of a conspiracy around Woolf was far more thoroughly and relentlessly developed; both Poole’s central argument – whose premise was that once we understand the causes of Woolf’s behaviour, ‘crude and offensive’ words like ‘mad’ no longer apply – and many of the particular bits of ...”

“... his politics as Communist and Christian Democratic. Alongside sharp and telling detail (‘No more bicycle thefts’) came involuntary testimony to thoughts which had been put out of mind: the Jews had ‘had their ears boxed’; some had been killed (‘many hundreds’, ‘several thousand’), but they had asked for it, and anyway the Germans were not ...”

“... almost exclusively at the power politics of theocracy, except for a few eccentrics such as Sir Thomas Urquhart of Cromarty. Theocratic failure and national defeat took place before the first signs of intellectual innovation. The most interesting 17th-century forerunner of the 18th-century efflorescence is Stair, whose Institutions captivate by their simple ...”

“... summarily, drily, in no way memorably. Why should this gifted man have failed to deliver something more rewarding? The answer is, of course, censorship. Not imposed – though that, too, possibly – so much as self-imposed. The FO in London – Berlin does not say so, but it can be inferred – knew that the Americans were reading the British Embassy ...”

“... No one ever failed more completely to be the hero of his own life than the painter Benjamin Robert Haydon, for whom heroism was an obsession. He used his own head as a model for Christ, Solomon, Alexander and Marcus Curtius and believed that heroic history painting was the highest form of art. Today his only generally remembered work is a portrait of Wordsworth ...”

“... unfair to the good work done previously by Hermione Lee and Victoria Glendinning, to name but two more orthodox critics: but it does indeed help – and very strikingly – to remove Bowen from the socially feminine personality on which her admirers used fondly to dote, and see how far she can run without her smart accessories of class, style and humour. A ...”

“... 24-hour track races, and drank from water bottles filled with ‘la Moutarde’: liquid cocaine. Thomas Hicks won the St Louis marathon in 1904 fuelled by raw eggs, injections of strychnine and doses of brandy, which were given to him as he ran. His doctor reported that the victory showed ‘drugs are of much benefit to athletes.’ Grigory Rodchenkov at ...”

“... Barthelme’s​ relationship with the New Yorker began in March 1963 and hasn’t ended yet, more than thirty years after his death. Every so often one of his stories pops up on the magazine’s monthly Fiction Podcast, in which writers are asked to choose a favourite piece from the archive to read and discuss. Many admit that they began their careers ...”

“... an effect: that of what Barthes calls ‘festivity’. Two years after Barthes’s death, Chantal Thomas wrote very well of ‘the persistence of a theoretical desire progressively liberated from a concern with seriousness or consequence’. Does that sound frivolous? The concept of theoretical desire suggests a project that might be urgent, as well as ...”

“... of plastic ingested in the absence of natural pasture. I asked a group of men in Haro Sheikh if more camels, the most valuable livestock in the local pastoral economy, had died. They all began pointing at once. ‘Behind that tree,’ one said. ‘And another there.’ ‘And there.’I had left Hargeisa, Somaliland’s nominal capital, early that morning ...”