“... own childhood. It often does. The comic war in Pantagruel is set in Utopia – Rabelais knew his Thomas More and borrowed from him both the thirsty Dipsodes and the obscure Amaurotes. In Gargantua he fits the rivalries between France and the Holy Roman Empire into the tiny world of castle, wood and ford which could be seen from the windows of his ...”

“... himself as a leader in the way that his contemporary Ramsay MacDonald did. He thought of himself more as a representative than a politician, and as Brown’s biography shows, it’s striking how certain he was that he expressed the views of those he represented and on whose behalf he fought: children and the unemployed mainly. An ‘agitator for ...”

“... the Germans fought a war to assert theirs – or so many German intellectuals felt in August 1914. Thomas Mann’s contribution to this eruption of nationalist self-consciousness was delivered in a series of essays written over the following four years, and it is among the strangest things he ever wrote. Not the least paradox of this exacting, ambitious and ...”

“... the maskers seem to improvise witty or pathetic dialogue, according to an agreed storyline. D.M. Thomas remarks that he is indebted to Germaine Greer for supplying him with information about the tradition of the improvisatrici in Italy: he has constructed Swallow (‘the second,’ he says, ‘in a series of improvisational novels’) in the form of a story ...”

“... was ordained. The same year, his father bought for him the living of New Brentford, worth £200 or more. The long-term consequence of this was that Horne was debarred as a clergyman from the two careers at which he had the talent and inclination to excel, the law and Parliamentary politics, for he spoke well and wrote better. During the 1760s, he took every ...”

“... awful’. Early memoirists take us further with Swift’s character, but only so far. His godson Thomas Sheridan recalled that ‘he always appeared to the world in a mask, which he never took off but in the company of his most intimate friends.’ Yet this unmasking, such as it was, only seems to have confused things further. The most memorable assessments ...”

“... He went first to Heidelberg to learn German, then in 1892 enrolled as a medical student at St Thomas’s Hospital. His first book, Liza of Lambeth, published in 1897, when he was 23, owed much to Maupassant and Zola. It was a grimy realist novel about the South London underclass he’d come into contact with through the hospital – a first instance of ...”

“... know whether to laugh or to cry at the procedure, and two Colombian Indians are reported by Hugh Thomas as saying, in 1515, that the Pope must have been drunk when he divided between the Spanish and the Portuguese so much land which wasn’t his to give. The procedure was not simply absurd, however. Or even ‘at once ridiculous and touching’, as ...”

“... had an equivalent amount of random content removed. Two controls were required because there’s more than twice as much positive content as negative on Facebook. Posts were defined as either negative or positive depending on whether or not they included certain words, determined by a software package called Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count. Its ...”

“... the brief time this theoretical pasting took to compose and the age of the paster (would it be more acceptable coming from a 63-year-old?), the second half of Jack’s sentence decisively negates the first. Especially if the book in question is being lavishly praised elsewhere. Of course, if you’re its author or publisher, or the author’s best ...”

“... A casual player might respond to an opponent’s ZO by saying: ‘Zo? What does that mean?’ A more advanced player would say nothing, and stick a D in front of it. In English, zo and dzo are alternative spellings of zho, a hybrid cow found in the Himalayas, the offspring of a domestic horned cow and a yak (the female is known as a zhomo). In English, zo ...”

“... hit the button.’ Not the button marked ‘launch baby whale,’ but the one that makes you sell more copies than OK!, Hello and Heat. Ennis thinks that ‘the celebrity thing is bound to bottom-out’ because ‘too many people are trying to jump onto it.’ When it does, she’ll no doubt head happily off to edit Cetacean Obstetrics Monthly; but what will ...”

“... life-threatening circumstances. If excitement is what a commercial pilot is after, he’s more likely to find it working bush planes in Africa, flying supplies and international aid workers to remote hospitals, or running drugs through South and Central America or over Eastern Europe. Langewiesche admonishes those who believe the landing on the Hudson ...”

“... written a study of the subject, though there is Barbara Trapido’s novel Brother of the More Famous Jack, and it’s one of the themes of John Lanchester’s first novel, The Debt to Pleasure. Among the many irritations must be to find yourself always referred to as so-and-so’s brother or sister, and to be written about as such by smart-arses. Ali ...”

“... overtures from Francis I promising a lucrative professorship. But Erasmus and Budé made it up, more or less. Why were Renaissance letter-writers so indiscreet? Their letters show that their message-bearers and servants were feckless, inclined to tipple or get into wrong company. When scholars were on friendly terms, it was courteous not to publish their ...”