“... oldest universities. Neither phenomenon is new, but that is not all they have in common: both can be regarded as symptoms of madness, which is always making news – this, at any rate, is the diagnosis favoured by Nkosi and Arnold. They discount the talk of journalists and are at pains to show how states of emergency or of ...”

“... brisk notes made of Paris nightlife at the turn of the century, and then our attention is arrested by six drawings which include no topical reference at all. They represent a female nude kneeling, facing a larger, shadowy, seated figure of indeterminate sex between whose legs her head is placed. A seventh drawing shows the kneeling girl alone. The ...”

“... Determining the ‘source’ of a river is, it turns out, not a simple matter. There may be many plausible contenders. You can argue that it is the joining together and accumulation of the water from a number of tributaries that constitutes the ‘source’, not any one of them in particular. This issue gave pause even to Victorian explorers, not ...”

“... the land today between Israelis and Palestinians. The map most people recall is the one proposed by the so-called Priestly writers, who were responsible for Leviticus and a code emphasising purity and elaborate ritual distinctions, and were active from around the early eighth century BCE onwards. In this map the Jordan firmly demarcates the eastern border of ...”

“... small operations that barely manage to cover the cost of server space. Users are brought together by a shared (usually offline) interest and tend to number in the hundreds or thousands. While Facebook requires that users’ online avatars mirror their legal, offline identities, almost everyone on message boards uses a pseudonym. While exchanges are frequently ...”

“... Munch. Any biographer of Strindberg has to assess his shuttling between sanity and what could be called madness. Prideaux writes of his paranoia, but – one neurosis not excluding another – he may also have suffered from manic depression. Periods of intense productivity rapidly succeeded others of total fallowness; amiability followed reclusiveness and ...”

“... is more than he can afford; his three credit cards are nearly maxed out. She’s so embarrassed by all this she begs not to be thrown a birthday party. Then he buys a scratch card and wins $10,000. He has the backyard landscaped, buys Lilly fancy gifts, and throws her a surprise party. As a finishing touch, he splurges on ...”

“... appropriate that just as the ‘reformed’ welfare state is ushered in, Margaret Thatcher should be ushered out. Appropriate too, that she, whose policies generated so much homelessness, should end her days in the Ritz. There used to be a genre of Labour autobiography with titles like ‘From Crowscaring to ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Before he began to eat, the book was No. 66 on Amazon. Fire and Fury wasn’t yet on sale. By the end of lunch it was No. 1. The next day you could get copies in London. Not that long afterwards, it was No. 1 in Germany. Resentment broke out, as if Wolff, who has written mostly about the media in the past, had stolen a subject from the seasoned ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... father and uncles and cousins to Marlborough, where he was the 21st Leach, but he turned out to be the first who was unable to hit a cricket ball or bring down a pheasant, and accordingly was miserable. He found his years there even more dreadful than his time as a guerrilla in Burma during the war. At home he was under the thumb of his mother, much younger ...”

“... For an old Red like me, bowed down by years of Thatcher, Reagan, Clinton and Blair, these two books are full of exhilaration and hope. George Monbiot writes mainly about Britain in a terse investigative style that I had feared was out of date. Naomi Klein, based in Canada, ranges all over the world and writes infectiously with verve and passion ...”

“... things, and our early experiences of its forms and pleasures are unlikely to have been prompted by artworks unless we were surrounded by them in early childhood. My own memories of intense sensation – the painful experience of touching very cold things, say, for me indelibly associated with plunging my hands into ...”