“... I don’t mean some cosy idea of multiculturalism and human togetherness. Opportunistic secularism may have run out of steam, but if the BJP thinks it knows what to replace it with, it’s mistaken. For the first time since Independence, India feels unliveable in, not just for minorities under assault but for large swathes of the population. The BJP is a ...”

“... and followers. We make shopping lists and bucket lists and reading lists; wishlists of DVDs we may one day watch or seeds we hope to plant and catalogues of countries we have visited or books we have read. To go to a shop armed with a scrap of paper that says ‘eggs, milk, pears’ is to believe that you have a script and are the one in charge, even if ...”

“... him with Archibald Constable, George Smith, John Blackwood, George Routledge, Frederick Macmillan, David Garnett, Ian Parsons, Allen Lane. It was one of the most highly regarded of today’s younger publishers, Peter Straus (now an agent), who commissioned the book. None of these coat-brushers of genius is a household name: most publishers remain ...”

“... I write as I type, or I type as I write (do cats eat bats or do bats eat cats?). ‘Whatever they may do,’ the bibliographer Roger Stoddard has noted, ‘authors do not write books.’ Leah Price and Pamela Thurschwell take up the distinction and declare that their volume will focus ‘on the representation, self-representation and non-representation, in ...”

“... Malawi. I am thinking of Kenneth Mdala’s suggestions for the memorials to Queen Victoria and David Livingstone – suggestions which I somewhat desperately, and ultimately unsuccessfully, attempted to interpret as ironic. Victoria was for Kenneth Mdala, as for many Africans, an icon. She was the ‘great mother’, the guarantor of British fairness to ...”

“... books by Alain Ehrenberg and Philippe Pignarre, along with a third, published a few years ago by David Healy,* forcefully underscore the incongruous fact that depression was never so prevalent as it has been since the introduction of antidepressants. It has always been with us, though it went by other names and sometimes assumed different shapes, depending ...”

“... turns out to be less unlikely than it might sound: it seems that Bentham repeatedly wrote to David Collins, Lieutenant-Governor of the Port Philip colony, encouraging him to build a panopticon in New South Wales. A convict called Pobjoy exists in history, as does a penal chronicler called Lemprière, who worked at Macquarie Harbour as a storekeeper ...”

“... Anna O., Zelda Fitzgerald, Marilyn Monroe and Sylvia Plath are household names. Not everyone may be able instantly to identify Henriette Cornier (who in 1825 chopped off her 19-month-old charge’s head), or Augustine (Charcot’s ‘model patient’, whose much publicised poses taught a generation of mental patients and filmmakers what hysteria should ...”

“... or lack thereof displayed by senior officers. Given the right circumstances, a particular general may wield clout approaching MacArthur’s before he self-destructed. This was the case with Colin Powell in the wake of Operation Desert Storm, and with David Petraeus when the Iraq Surge of 2007-08 seemed, briefly, to ...”

“... politics. No Labour politician of his time better justified the proposition, which Denis Healey may have been the first to make, that ‘Labour owed more to Methodism than to Marx.’ From his religion, Bevin probably also derived his frugality and diligence. Though he drank and smoked himself to death, and enjoyed the music hall and Chelsea Football ...”

“... hazards than Your Majesty.’ ‘Not so,’ said William. ‘I am where it is my duty to be; and I may without presumption commit my life to God’s keeping; but you …’At this instant, a cannonball from the ramparts laid Godfrey dead at the king’s feet. Macaulay goes on to say that ‘it was not found, however, that the fear of being Godfreyed – such ...”

“... flagship, ‘all the world never saw such a force as theirs.’ When it left Lisbon harbour on 28 May 1588, the Armada comprised 150 vessels, ranging from thousand-ton merchantmen to small felucca message boats. The mission, under the command of the duke of Medina Sidonia, was to get boots on the ground for an invasion of England. The fleet carried 18,973 ...”

“... history – a moment reached on 20 July 2019, when he recorded 4876 days (exceeding the record of David Ben-Gurion). Netanyahu began the interview by boasting about the extent of American popular support for Israel. Citizens accosted him on trips across the US, hardly any of whom, he insisted with pleasure, were Jews. The subtext was that anyone in their ...”

“... A Life is thus enriched not only by recent studies of the biographical archive (notably David Thomas’s Shakespeare in the Public Records, 1985, and Robert Bearman’s Shakespeare in the Stratford Records, 1994) but by the work of Peter Thomson and Andrew Gurr on the fortunes of Elizabethan acting companies, or of Douglas Bruster on Troilus and ...”

“... into the dementia that swallowed him for the last five years of his life, was his own epitaph. In May 1740 he made his will, fastidiously apportioning his property and specifying arrangements for his interment. He stipulated that he be buried ‘as privately as possible, and at Twelve o’clock at Night’ in the great aisle of Dublin’s St Patrick’s ...”