“... complex situation, contradicting mythological simplifications, yet showing where the roots of such may be found. Likewise, she confirms, so far as this area goes, the traditional view that lower-class Scots showed an unusual thirst for learning – as when the people of remote Glen Tilt petitioned the 3rd Duke in 1769 for a school convenient for their ...”

“... hardly see the sky. The cafés have charming names that ‘read like a Levantine requiem’, as David Holden wrote of old Alexandrian phonebooks. From the terrace of the fish restaurant where I had lunch, I watched children playing on the beach; a few women were in bikinis, a rare sight in a city where more and more women wear full niqabs, including black ...”

“... a mention of a ‘magic, incantatory function’. Jakobson gives examples: a Lithuanian spell (‘May this sty dry up, tfu, tfu, tfu, tfu’) a North Russian incantation (‘Water, queen river, daybreak! Send grief beyond the blue sea, to the sea bottom, like a grey stone never to rise from the sea bottom, may grief never ...”

“... during 1967, as Jordan resumed work on the Mukheiba Dam to create a reservoir on the Yarmouk. In May, Egypt blockaded the Straits of Tiran and massed troops on the Israeli border in Sinai. Jordan signed a defence pact with Egypt and allowed Iraqi and Saudi troops to enter its territory. On 5 June 1967, Israel launched a pre-emptive strike, and six days later ...”

“... What she felt about her war work is impossible to know, but she did it efficiently. Something may be deduced from the fact that, having been an active member of her father’s congregation and of the student Christian Union, she emerged from the war an atheist. The job of political secretary was a perfect fit for her. ‘She was really completely ...”

“... masculine sceptic while Mulder is the feminine believer. (What a man! I would exclaim as I watched David Duchovny in his little swimsuit. What a man!) It is not in the riverine quality of her voice, banked by reeds, sometimes pierced low by waterbirds. It is not even in her partner’s reaction, his one liquid larger pupil, the soft hopeless hope that he turns ...”

“... party, both started out as ‘terrorists’. Begin was behind the 1946 bombing of the King David Hotel, which killed nearly a hundred civilians; Shamir planned the 1948 kidnapping and assassination of the UN representative Folke Bernadotte. Yitzhak Rabin, revered among liberal Zionists as a peacemaker, oversaw the deportation of tens of thousands of ...”

“... observed it so completely that he returned from Britain to the certainty of a lifetime in jail. It may be, of course, that Slovo was ordered abroad by some secret Party directive: we just don’t know. Everything that followed depended on that derision to leave and yet it is mysterious. There is no doubt that Slovo lived a life of complete political commitment ...”

“... least one chimp (which survived at Lindi for more than two years) came from the Mbandaka area, so may well have been one of Hahn’s west central African chimps. Because cages and play-cages were shared, just one such SIV-infected chimp might have caused widespread SIV infection throughout the colony. So even if Hahn is right, it doesn’t disprove the OPV ...”

“... are not variable confessions but different worlds, and different instruments of understanding. David Kepesh in The Dying Animal offers a strong sidelight on Roth in The Plot against America, a comic view of liberty and nation which darkens and widens in the new novel. Kepesh, divorced and determined never to make the mistake of marriage again, takes true ...”

“... bleak emotional weather of autobiographical works such as Boyhood (1997) and Youth (2002). Coetzee may not actively seek this response, but he can hardly be surprised by it. In Diary of a Bad Year a character who closely resembles the author – more of this figure later – imagines his father’s opinion of him. ‘A selfish child, he must have thought, who ...”

“... These images, which astonished the Surrealists-to-be when they were first shown in Paris in May 1921, provided the basic template for the Surrealist picture, even for painters as visually different as René Magritte. While Surrealist images were sometimes patterned on screen memories, Surrealist objects were often modelled on sexual fetishes, which, in ...”

“... Brutus’ name from his speech entirely’, Cicero says, before going on to hint that the omission may have had something to do with the fact that Brutus’ mother, Servilia, was sleeping with Caesar. Their relationship led to the rumour (which can’t be true) that Brutus was Caesar’s illegitimate son. Caesar​ began his campaigns in Gaul the following ...”

“... of Cesky Krumlov, seat of the powerful Rozmberk family. It was at this inn, on the evening of 3 May 1591, that the English alchemist, clairvoyant and con-man Edward Kelley was arrested by officers of Emperor Rudolf II. At the time of his arrest Kelley was an internationally famous figure, but thereafter the story grows confused: he disappears from view into ...”

“... pages, of which only the first 93 have previously been printed. Lawrence wrote the book between May 1920, when he had just finished The Lost Girl, and some time in 1921. He gave up working on Mr Noon in order to dash off the travel book Sea and Sardinia, and was at the same time writing Aaron’s Rod. He had trouble finishing both the novels: Aaron’s Rod ...”