“... of widespread vote rigging’, even as he concedes in a later chapter that the parties hired ‘young hoodlums’, a move which led directly to the tragedy of Odi? The problem is that he doesn’t really know what he thinks of ‘the most confounding, frustrating, and at the same time engaging place I have ever visited’ – itself a meaningless ...”

“... find it.” That is the most important truth that has ever been uttered,’ he said in his Leslie Stephen Lecture of 1933, published as The Name and Nature of Poetry. His poetry is always fascinated by what is irresolvable – ‘Keep we must, if keep we can/These foreign laws of God and man’ – and his scholarly prose concerned, above all, with such ...”

“... BCE – immediately after the conquest of Lydia by Cyrus, the aggressive and imperially expansive young king of Persia – the Greeks of Asia Minor, who had previously lived under the easy-going rule of Croesus the Lydian, and had received a sharp rebuff when they tried to get a similar deal from Cyrus, approached the Spartans for a protective alliance. The ...”

“... perfect record in policing migration in a country with rampant unemployment, especially among the young. As the Dutch president, Mark Rutte, put it in Cairo, ‘sometimes you have to dance with whoever’s on the dance floor.’ Some dance partners, like Niger, perform the required steps with perfect fidelity. At the 2015 Valletta Summit on Migration – the ...”

“... were on average 14 per cent heavier than women’s. Broca’s data were elegantly picked apart by Stephen Jay Gould in The Mismeasure of Man. Most of the difference is accounted for by differences in height and build between men and women, and once corrected for these, the gross difference evaporates. After Broca’s death – it turned out at his post-mortem ...”

“... the trappings of the hardened old warhorse you could still see traces of the impetuous young thoroughbred, who had enchanted Leiris and others a quarter of a century before.’ Well, yes. Most of us were easier to take when young, especially if we were beautiful, energetic, bright and eagerly ambitious, as Sonia ...”

“... and Tchelitchew, when they most needed it. Since his Oxford days – until an adverse review from Stephen Spender destroyed his confidence – he had published poetry (mostly his own) in luxurious limited editions. He also wrote one well-received novel, The Gardener who saw God. He spent the Second World War in the United States, largely in California, where ...”

“... cage of a new type that can be slipped between two combs in the brood chamber’) by a distressed young woman posing, rather pointlessly, as a local journalist. This fails to deceive Holmes for a moment – for has she not sent him a handwritten letter from a private address? – and the real occasion of her visit turns out to be anxiety over her ...”

“... alternative existences. By contrast, Jacobson’s wife is not named in the memoir: she is ‘the young woman’, another gesture, it seems to me, towards what Stephen Dedalus calls ‘the room of the infinite possibilities’ that events have ousted. Jacobson and his future wife later watch Miss Bunbury from their rented ...”

“... and drawn fighters from across Africa to join them. They have also recruited local youths, some as young as 14. Those rallying under the Islamist banner don’t necessarily share the same agenda. Some are cocaine traffickers seeking new partners and protection. Others hope to get a piece of the million-dollar ransoms collected from Europeans kidnapped in the ...”

“... belated reaction to mass killings in Bosnia, where she worked in the early 1990s as a young freelance reporter. She was understandably appalled by what happened after the carnage began in 1992: ‘Despite unprecedented public outcry about foreign brutality, for the next three and a half years the United States, Europe and the United Nations stood ...”

“... being involved in a male brothel scandal, and a close friend of his Cambridge tutor, James Kenneth Stephen, a cousin of Virginia Woolf, who fasted to death in an asylum after Eddy died. Is that all the scandal, then? Well no, not quite. Eddy died in 1892 only weeks after he became engaged to Princess May (as the future queen was then known). We are invited to ...”

“... by a manuscript illustration of boys skating and sledging, represent the environment in which the young Becket grew up, but we’re given little sense of the city itself with its diverse population of recent immigrants, foreign merchants, and its notable Jewish community. The young Becket was proud of his roots. An example ...”

“... When​ my grandfather died of a heart attack in 1927, he was the father of three young children and did not know that a fourth child, my mother, was on the way. This strangeness – the growth of a baby after the death of its parent – was both tragic and miraculous. It made my mother feel odd about her existence, I think, which is not the same as feeling odd about herself ...”

“... of his favourites. It shows the top storeys of two houses with an upper porch and two figures, a young and an older woman. I don’t think there was really any idea of symbolism in the two figures. There might have been vaguely; certainly not obsessively so. I was more interested in the sunlight on buildings and on the figures than in any symbolism. Jo posed ...”