“... of Hemon’s earlier work, the narrator is reconstructing the past at a time close to the present day. It emerges that the account we are reading came to the narrator via a woman called Rahela – ‘Pinto would tell Rahela many years later’. But it’s another hundred pages before we find out that Rahela is Osman’s daughter, born in the Fergana Valley in ...”

“... to kill one German during the Battle of the Somme. Two million shells fired in eight hours on one day at Verdun. Eighty-five per cent of German men between 17 and 50 mobilised. Advances in medicine meant that more than 80 per cent of wounded British soldiers were returned to some form of duty. Governments discovered that they could squeeze far more out of ...”

“... hoped to take part in the climb, joined the search for the bodies. They never found Lord Francis Douglas. The chaplain decided to bury what there was of the other three in the snow and read over them the 90th Psalm, from a prayer-book found in the pocket of the dead divine, the Rev. Charles Hudson. Unsurprisingly, the Swiss authorities were displeased about ...”

“... to function in the Thirties; it was in Garrick Yard and had been Chippendale’s workshop and when Douglas Byng first used the stable for a night-club in the Twenties Chippendale’s lathe was still hanging from a beam. All Motley’s costumes were stored there and when it was blitzed early in the war John G. came down the morning after and found nothing ...”

“... we might ask of a biography – a sense, for example, of how Hogg’s life was lived, if not day by day, then at least month by month – will not be provided. But then, to mount a rigorous chronological reconstruction of Hogg’s life – to do for Hogg what Roy Foster has done for Yeats – would be neither ...”

“... Given drew on satellite tracking before sailing into the canal. It was also a definitively bad day for the Egyptian pilots who were in charge of the ship during its passage through the canal. Also annoyed and upset: everyone stuck on board the several hundred ships waiting to go through. Everyone worried about the stupefyingly diverse cargo on board all ...”

“... He was ‘a notoriously bad correspondent’, who wrote very few letters by the standards of the day, for the most part only when business was pressing or ‘when he was goaded into it by his friends’. As a result, just 193 of his letters survive, and a further 129 written to him, most of the correspondence dating from the later part of his life, after the ...”

“... I wonder.’ With Jewett’s encouragement, Cather left McClure’s. She went to visit her brother Douglas, who was working for the railroad in Winslow, Arizona. The South-West – former Spanish territory, more rugged and sublime than Nebraska – thrilled her. She wrote that Albuquerque was ‘like the country between Marseille and Nice only much more ...”

“... macro level: Irving Stone’s 1934 novel, made into an honourably hilarious film in 1956 with Kirk Douglas as Van Gogh and Anthony Quinn as Gauguin, was called Lust for Life. The original Dutch phrase, as rendered in the great six-volume set of letters published in 2009 by the Van Gogh Museum, was ‘zest for life’. We have a problem of seeing, just as we ...”

“... Delius incorporated some of this music into Florida (1887), which depicts across four movements a day on the plantation, and in later works such as Appalachia (1902) and his opera Koanga (1897). This was based on an episode from an 1880 novel, The Grandissimes: A Story of Creole Life, by the American author George Washington Cable. One central character is an ...”

“... to stay in the United Kingdom ‘for the moment, see how it goes, maybe I’ll feel different one day …’ This sort of self-persuasion also released a horde of disgusted Scottish Lib Dems into the SNP park. Talking to some of them in Edinburgh and Glasgow, I saw that this was often their second migration. Once they had been refugees from Blairism and New ...”

“... reign at the Telegraph with the stream of memos which flowed from his fifth floor eyrie every day. They were occasionally constructive, rarely complimentary and almost invariably nit-picking – the work of a man who was obsessed by the small change of journalism. Hartwell’s great merit was that he insisted on a fair and balanced presentation of ...”

“... technique of diving and a technique of education in diving which had been discovered in Mauss’s day, and as with every technique, it involved an apprenticeship. Then again, Mauss noticed that there were even techniques of sleep. It is quite misleading to say that the way we sleep is something entirely natural. There are societies that have nothing to sleep ...”

“... limits), the workings of the prison system and the jury system kept from the light of common day, and national security in its varied applications most rigidly safeguarded. Personal experience obliges me to agree with him that ‘the love of indirection, the cosiness of a tight personal élite, and the sheer self-importance of government servants, find ...”

“... the Tuileries, birds were singing.’ Elsewhere, a young woman cries too, and we are told that ‘day was breaking, and some wagons were driving by.’ And on one extraordinary occasion, the real world doesn’t comment or go on its way: it stops in its tracks. Frédéric is happy for once, and ‘the tall trees out in the garden that, till now, had been ...”