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“... found the town boring and persuaded his father, who administered the Hungarian estates of the King of Bavaria, to move to Munich, where there was more society and she had a wealthy brother. Here, she brought about her husband’s decline, the suicide of her daughter, and her son’s conversion from her own Judaism to Catholicism. (It was the first, but ...”

“... about a young Irish Traveller:We stayed there while the sky lightened lilac at the edges. Me and Martin, joined at the hair, joined at the knuckles. We didn’t move, didn’t speak. I think he felt it too – some unspoken sense that if we stayed very still, if we blurred into each other it mightn’t be real. We tried that elusive magic of ...”

“... Howell examines the presence of malaria in the work of Dickens and Henry James, concentrating on Martin Chuzzlewit (1844) and Daisy Miller (1878). Both books were written before Ronald Ross proved, in 1897, that the malaria parasite was transmitted by the female mosquito’s bite rather than by miasma; each depicts the disease, known at the time as ‘Roman ...”

“... flight to Varennes. Nor should he have been, for Part One was published several months before the king fled and Paine was manhandled. According to Hitchens, Part Two was produced partly to explain to Dr Johnson the need for a written constitution, and partly to endorse Ricardo’s views on commerce and free trade, but when it was written Johnson had been dead ...”

“... be allowed to own guns.) John Rice was one of the few local black religious leaders not to join Martin Luther King’s marches, for which his daughter offers a few explanations: he thought the Children’s Crusade put children at risk, and he was anxious that his church might be firebombed and if it were, the ...”

“... much the same and more from the many masterly works on Jesus and Judaism by Geza Vermes, or from Martin Goodman’s thrillingly epic overview of the same period, Rome and Jerusalem: The Clash of Ancient Civilisations. Aslan writes clearly and sensibly, though he is overfond of snappy two-word punchlines as narrative punctuation, and his publisher has forced ...”

“... no ice. The two straits are part of the Northwest Passage, the so-called ‘Arctic Grail’. From Martin Frobisher in 1576 to John Franklin in 1845, generations of European explorers searched for a navigable route through the Arctic islands to Asia. Many of them – including Franklin and his men – died in the attempt. Their greatest challenge was ...”

“... Running); disenfranchisement during the capitalist takeovers of the 1970s and 1980s (Jitney, King Hedley II); and troubled assimilation into the mainstream in the 1990s (Radio Golf).Taken collectively, the plays dispute America’s myth of itself as a redeemer nation. The white immigrants who arrived on its shores left their past for a better ...”

“... everyone with boisterous condescension,’ Chester Himes remembered. ‘It was obvious he was the king thereabouts.’His place on the throne was shakier than he imagined. The novels he wrote in Paris, where he would spend the rest of his life, failed to deliver on the promise of Native Son, the incendiary tale of a poor black chauffeur in Chicago, Bigger ...”

“... the company. But ‘Mrs K says defunutely: Nyet.’ The dance critics Arnold Haskell and John Martin denounced his ‘tragic’ mistake, his lamentable disloyalty. An article appeared in Izvestia under the name of Serge Lifar, the same Lifar who had awarded Nureyev the Nijinsky Prize: ‘He has become a star by sheer virtue of the fact that he is a ...”

“... plans for a permanent memorial for himself: a thanksgiving for having become the least likely king of England since William in 1066. Henry placed his tomb in Westminster Abbey, served by the most elaborate chantry chapel in English history, but this was only the centrepiece of a series of arrangements involving a consortium of the greatest Benedictine ...”

“... a pedestal frequently end up toppling into the mud. Assassination tends to preserve reputations (Martin Luther King, Chico Mendes). Elected office can put the seal on a career or soil it for ever: for every Nelson Mandela, there is an Aung San Suu Kyi. Greta Thunberg at 16 is one thing, but it is hard to picture her going ...”

“... fighters would have to overcome the temptations of primordial revenge, and develop what Martin Luther King, citing Reinhold Niebuhr, called a ‘spiritual discipline against resentment’. In line with this commitment, Fanon’s vision of decolonisation embraced not only colonised Muslims, freeing themselves from ...”

“... and Warburg, one of Britain’s best-known general trade publishers. The firm was begun in 1910 by Martin Secker, and rescued from bankruptcy in 1936 when Frederic Warburg joined as a partner. Warbarg went on to build an outstanding list and was independent to the point of being a trade maverick. (It was Secker and Warburg who took on Animal Farm after ...”

“... back to the religion of their youth. Kselman describes, for example, the climactic moment in Roger Martin du Gard’s 1913 novel Jean Barois. Freethinking apostle of science and reason, Barois finds himself reciting a desperate Hail Mary when his horse-drawn carriage collides with two Parisian street-cars. Uninjured but morally shaken by his retreat into ...”