“... phone booths used as urinals, the entire city as a running sore – finds its locus in a soigné black pickpocket in a camel-hair coat who, as the pièce de résistance after isolating and robbing Sammler, forces the old man to look down as he exposes himself. Quite a production is made of the Unbuttoning, and the organ itself is prosed with an exotic plump ...”

“... and Veronika Weiss. Rodger then went on a drive-by shooting spree through Isla Vista, killing Christopher Michaels-Martinez, also a student at UCSB, with a single bullet to the chest inside a Deli Mart, and wounding 14 others. He eventually crashed his BMW coupé at an intersection. He was found dead by the police, having shot himself in the head. In the ...”

“... earlier. A comparable mistake today, Johnson believed, could leave twenty million dead instantly. Christopher Clark’s breathtakingly good book is, much more self-consciously than Tuchman’s, also a history for its – that is, our – times. An act of terrorism in Sarajevo – the assassination of the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne and his wife ...”

“... Christopher Nolan’s $250 million action movie version of Homer’s ancient Greek poem is an entertaining way to hide from the high temperatures for a few hours. Nolan’s trademark jumps and twists in the narrative structure are relatively easy to follow, and appropriate for The Odyssey, a narrative of tales nested in tales ...”

“... by heart: ‘In overthrowing me, you have cut down in San Domingo only the trunk of the tree of black liberty. It will spring up again by the roots for they are numerous and deep.’ In November 1803 the former slaves won what proved to be the war’s final battle, and on 1 January 1804 declared the independent republic of Haiti. It was Latin America’s ...”

“... man; eyes disappointing; rather heavy; middle-class; sunk; grumpy; self-important; wore a black waistcoat’. They all called each other Van, Bogey, Ramsay, Eadie, across the table; engaged in governing England ... Bogey has the glazed stuffed look of the well fed bachelor. Is evidently one of those elderly comfortable men of taste and leisure who ...”

“... sticking out of his breast pocket, wearing on his head, of all things, a trilby hat with a broad black band; lined up behind him are three messengers waiting to take his copy to the post office. The man is identified as the Reuters correspondent, J.W. Collins. The text tells us, though, that the Reuters correspondent in Abyssinia in 1935 was Major Jim ...”

“... car outside a flat at Neuss near Frankfurt. In the car was a bomb, moulded into the workings of a black Toshiba cassette recorder. In the ensuing weeks other raids were carried out on alleged terrorist hideaways in Germany, and 16 suspects arrested. One of them was Mohammad Abu Talb, another member of the PFLP, who was almost instantly released. Even more ...”

“... during a Bolivian insurgency. In London, he helped run a new countercultural newspaper, the Black Dwarf, whose offices were ‘a regular port of call for visiting revolutionaries from all over the world’. During his teens, twenties and early thirties, he was considered such a troublemaker that the governments of Pakistan, Britain, France and the ...”

“... to wooden carvings have long since been chased away, the state having realised that a prospering black market means little VAT is collected; all law and order has gone; the shopfronts are the same, but now there is just emptiness where people used to be; and the people you do see don’t just look ill, they look as though they are dying. In some ways ...”

“... and in Medea’s hand, arranging a tryst: ‘Look out, in the left aisle, for a lady wearing a black mantle, and holding a rose.’ Boundaries between fantasy and fact seem to dissolve, as the magnetism of the past frustrates the aspirations of the present. The narrators of these stories have their own projects – they are painters, musicians or writers ...”

“... Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government, published in 2016, the political scientists Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels described what happened when sharks started attacking bathers off the New Jersey shore in the summer of 1916. It was a wholly unexpected turn of events: sharks had never been seen that far north before. When lifeguards began ...”

“... There was a lot of racial tension around bebop. Black men were going with fine, rich white bitches. They were all over these niggers out in public and the niggers were clean as a motherfucker and talking all kind of hip shit. Trane liked to ask all these motherfucking questions back then about what he should or shouldn’t play ...”

“... felt great regret.Parrots are a recurring feature of early European voyages to the Americas. When Christopher Columbus landed in the Caribbean, he didn’t spot any livestock – ‘neither sheep nor goats nor any other beast’ – but he did see wild parrots and was given some tame ones as a gift. Shortly afterwards, during his first journey along coastal ...”

“... when he was first experimenting: ‘The cows were like a hundred feet away. I mean, three little black dots … but I knew it was cows in a field.’ As an adult, he took some striking photos of animals: cows, dogs, goats. In his mind, they were no different from his portraits of humans. ‘I don’t look at a cow and see a person,’ Lebowitz said. ‘But ...”