“... and the Gold Coast. Cyprus is a running sore . . .’ This was the real difference with Eden. Robert Murphy, the US Deputy Secretary of State, visited Eden just a fortnight after Macmillan wrote those words. He noted with wonder that Eden ‘was labouring under the impression that a common identity of interests existed among the allies. The Prime Minister ...”

“... as ‘naive’: surely he was no more so than the sixth-century bishop Gregory of Tours? Indeed he may well still be being widely read as authoritative in some quarters, just as the Le Pens of this world will go on reading Gregory and his modern retailers because it suits their purposes. Ethnicity is ‘impervious to mere rational disproof’. This is why ...”

“... conditions of Fascist Italy (the Racial Laws were enacted in 1938) and the imminent threat of war may well have shaped these choices and given rise to an encoded quality in the writing. But how hermetic are the poems? Arrow-smith appended voluminous notes to his translations. Galassi, too, includes 170 pages or so of notes in small print, quoting from a range ...”

“... predecessors. Others, including Halley and his London colleague, the irascible natural philosopher Robert Hooke, had the idea that orbiting bodies tended to move in straight lines while at the same time being pulled towards some force-centre. Only Newton fully exploited its implications. He defined forces by the changes they produced in the motions of bodies ...”

“... He turned down the executors who asked him to write an ending for the novel left unfinished at Robert Louis Stevenson’s death, but agreed to complete his friend Grant Allen’s Hilda Wade (in which a clairvoyant nurse outsmarts and outbikes her would-be murderer across two continents) when Allen’s fatal illness left the serial with several months to ...”

“... she said in her final statement, ‘and that I reserve the right to cultivate any relations that may please me. The war is not sufficient reason to stop me from being a cosmopolitan.’ After her execution, her body went unclaimed by relatives and was dissected by medical students. Her head went to the Museum of Anatomy in Paris, where it joined a collection ...”

“... Howe and Eudora Welty. These and other signatories – the economist Kenneth Arrow, the poet Robert Penn Warren – were the critical intellectual core, the steady moral centre of American public life. But who, now, would sign such a protest? Liberalism in the United States today is the politics that dares not speak its name. And those who style ...”

“... the unique and the general; the way it recognises that while being illuminated with immensity may feel like a miracle to a soldier who has lived through a night – or night after night – in the trenches, it is to most people at most times just the start of another day. The features that render ‘Mattina’ so amenable to mass reproduction make it a ...”

“... 17 years later, claimed he knew the joint concerned. ‘If you know Hastings really well you may recognise it.’ Hastings or wherever (‘Burra-Burra Land’ Davenport called it), Burra created here one of his finest greed scenes, stiff with innuendo. The place is a composite. The salami slicer with the Swiss roll hairdo could well be Burra himself, or ...”

“... charcoal – in China, that meant the charred pods of the soap-bean tree. The recipe for gunpowder may have come from the kitchen, where meat was cured with saltpetre; sulphur was an ingredient in medicines. The optimal blend and its uses, including as an elixir, came from accident and experiment. A ninth-century Chinese text, the Classified Essentials of the ...”

“... not many Surrealists were active in the Resistance. Éluard participated, as did the poet Robert Desnos, who was arrested by the Gestapo in 1944 and died a year later at Theresienstadt. Another committed Surrealist was Claude Cahun (née Lucy Schwob), whose marvellous anti-memoir of texts and photomontages, Aveux non avenus, has appeared in a new ...”

“... they need no persuasion. As incarnate ideas, they have lost the power of thought, which may seem paradoxical till you reflect on it. These ordinary men, including fathers of families, have turned into syllogisms, and a syllogism cannot think but can merely go from A to B to C by a rigid track of inference. The devils of the Russian title are not the ...”

“... hundreds of thousands of Afghan refugees. Israel has established control of Iran’s skies and may send its fighter planes and drones there again, as it routinely does over Lebanon and Syria. All this could have been avoided. Ten years ago, the UN Security Council, the EU and Iran reached an agreement, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action ...”

“... systematic coverage of either the more or the less academic literature where our recommendations may have been discussed. The system of criminal justice, by which I understand not only the procedures for dealing with suspects, defendants, and appellants, but also the principles on which those procedures rest, is a topic on which feelings can and often do run ...”

“... imitating her squint against sunlight. The writers she is most directly associated with – Robert Creeley and Ed Dorn – were of the Black Mountain School, but she seems somehow to have more to do with the Beats, perhaps because she was always on the run; perhaps because of the drug addiction of her third husband, Buddy Berlin; perhaps because you can ...”