“... This enormous volume – beautifully designed, bound and typeset by its publishers – represents the merest sliver of Mavis Gallant’s lifelong achievement. Even discounting the two novels and the books of essays, what we have here can amount to little more than half the content of her nine published short-story collections ...”

“... small sofa in the Mount Vernon Room at the Westbury, a few feet from a pool of vomit, left behind by a woman accompanying the Australian Ashes team – when so many enthusiasts waited over half a century to set eyes on a stamp which they must have begun to doubt ever existed. The stamp was discovered in 1931 and in that same year vanished. ‘No one in New ...”

“... at the Paris Ritz in September 1993? The truth was that the bill had been paid, via Said Ayas, by Prince Mohammed, heir to the throne of Saudi Arabia. There was nothing especially horrific about this. Aitken’s association with the Saudi monarchy was well known. A couple of nights at the Ritz cost a thousand quid or so – a bagatelle in Aitken’s ...”

“... wasn’t a humanist invention: it had adorned classical texts to such an extent that it couldn’t be confined to the page’s foot, but swarmed in the margins, lavishly explaining and allegorising. Sometimes the text looks like the last remaining piece of ground above water in a time of flood. But humanist commentators had more urgent critical ...”

“... of the Outdoor Opera’: Sing as loud As you can At the outdoor opera – It will never Be loud Enough. Each section is, essentially, a one-liner which has spilled over its line. Some, like ‘Aesthetics of Comedy Asleep’, are mere squibs: ‘Don’t wake the clown/Or he may knock you down.’ Others like the witty ‘Aesthetics of ...”

“... in part because one of his supposed allies – the right-wing Yisrael Beiteinu party, led by Avigdor Lieberman – has refused to be part of any government led by him. The pressure on him was growing. Netanyahu was determined to win the election soundly and form a coalition before ...”

“... The comedy business​ in China used to be dominated by male entertainers from the north of the country. In the radio and television era, the most popular forms were xiangsheng (two-handers) and xiaopin (sketches). For xiangsheng, performers wear the traditional cheongsam, hold a fan in one hand and stand in front of a small table: the dou gen, or lead, tells the story and throws out punchlines, while the peng gen, his foil, takes the role of the ignorant spectator ...”

“... England: Wiltshire (1963), Nikolaus Pevsner wrote with barely contained anger thatWiltshire would be as wonderful as it must have been in Hardy’s, in Hudson’s and in Jefferies’s days, if the army, and more recently the air force, had not got hold of it. As it is, the army is up in Salisbury Plain with towns of barracks and genteel soldiers’ housing ...”

“... David Soren​ of the University of Arizona was excavating the remains of a villa just outside Lugnano in Umbria in 1992 when he uncovered a fifth-century mass grave: 47 small skeletons had been interred in layers, some pressed into large amphorae. A number of them were newborn babies. The deepest layer held only a corpse or two, but the higher levels were increasingly populated ...”

“... the large ships travelling to Martinique, Guadeloupe and St Domingue; work began on what was to be the magnificent Place de la Bourse on the Garonne and on the new merchant houses and shops for the luxury trades. Slave ships stopped at the port en route to West Africa: Bordeaux was one of the major anchorages along the French coast. Nantes dominated the ...”

“... On 19 June, a day after the opening, an eight-metre-high banner titled People’s Justice, painted by the Indonesian art collective Taring Padi, was hung from a scaffold in Friedrichsplatz, Kassel’s central square. It was a massive piece of agitprop, a cartoon-like version of a Diego Rivera mural, depicting perpetrators and victims of the Suharto ...”

“... her tunic’ – but she evidently doesn’t reciprocate. They’re young: ‘He wouldn’t be one of those boys who turned up at a girl’s house unannounced.’ He’s tall: when he stands up after putting her suitcase down, he ‘knocked his head against the bald light bulb’. He has recently arrived in England; the fittings and fixtures in the flat ...”

“... in 2014, constitutes a public health emergency of international concern.’ The statement by Margaret Chan, director-general of the World Health Organisation, on 1 February was very precise. It wasn’t about the spread of Zika virus itself, but about the possible complications of an infection caused by it. The ...”

“... mind), but Mazzetti adds a twist: her heroes are deaf-mutes. We watch them communicating by signing and facial expression, while the film itself is silent except for the spooky nursery rhymes and songs the kids sing. The two men, tenderly and domestically bonded, rely on each other for everything. As they make their way home from the docks where they ...”

“... There are​ two portraits Roger Fenton took of himself, separated by only a year, one of them in the exhibition of his photographs of the Crimean War at the Queen’s Gallery in Edinburgh (until 26 November) and the other not. The first, from 1854, seems conventional: we see a Victorian gentleman – hair parted, beard trimmed to cover only the underside of his face, leaving the strong chin to fight its own battles – seated in a chair, his arm resting on a covered table ...”