“... his proposals be forwarded to Mussolini in a letter. He wanted something quite different: ‘The matter will be settled man to man between Mussolini and me, or else it will be merely bitched, botched, and bungled, bureaucratised, bastardised, boozled, boggled, and altogether zum wasser.’ As if momentarily sensing the oddity of his truculent demand to meet ...”

“... regarded as a reckless unbeliever, and his name – along with those of Machiavelli, Hobbes and Herbert of Cherbury – became a byword for absolute atheism and hence, in Jacob’s terms, a rallying point for Radical Enlightenment. Jacob’s argument involved not only a new appreciation of 17th-century atheism and Spinoza’s early reputation, but also a ...”

“... properly got going, when becoming famous or celebrated or iconic was a completely different matter from what it is now. Photographs were key, and Acker photographed brilliantly, especially in the shots taken by Robert Mapplethorpe: that soft, white face, with big, round eyes in the cheeks of a chubby cherub; that soft, white skin, pierced and pinched ...”

“... Progress all the way to the semi-finals in 1998 vindicated the new Croatia’s existence. From ‘Herbert Zimmermann’s West German commentary at the end of the 1954 World Cup final to Papa Bouba Diop’s dance after scoring for Senegal against France in 2002, from Pelé’s volley in 1958 to al-Owairan’s remarkable goal against Belgium in 1994, from ...”

“... book.’ His argument was with critics who suggested that ‘the lexicon, techniques and subject-matter of gauchesco poetry should enlighten the contemporary writer, and are a point of departure and perhaps an archetype.’ He attacked the idea that ‘Argentine poetry must abound in Argentine differential traits and in Argentine local colour.’ Borges ...”

“... quite sufficient to produce shock or even death.’ Defence lawyers and their experts disagreed. Herbert Page, a railway company surgeon, argued that people who suffered railway spine had somehow allowed themselves to be overcome by fear; they developed symptoms that mimicked real diseases as if they had submitted themselves to hypnosis. This strange state ...”

“... rebuilding wasn’t a planner at all, but the city’s chief engineer between 1935 and 1963, Herbert Manzoni. Distrustful of architects and architecture, town planning and utopias, conservation and continuity, Manzoni shaped Birmingham as few other British cities have been shaped. Like Robert Moses in New York, he was without sentimentality or apparent ...”

“... These are mere irritants, and it might appear needlessly uncharitable to mention them. The matter is more serious when Hirschman, in the opening chapter of his Essays in Trespassing, states that his earlier work on unbalanced growth was a forerunner of Herbert Simon’s work on ‘satisficing’, when the chronology ...”

“... while ‘Watt was “nearly” taken in London, I forget by whom’ (a footnote informs us that Herbert Read at Routledge read the novel with ‘considerable bewilderment’ and found it ‘wild and unintelligible’). Having been through the same interminable round of rejections with Murphy in the 1930s, Beckett seems resigned to disappointment and even ...”

“... calls ‘a dreame of passion’. Or, borrowing a superlative phrase from a later poet, George Herbert, we might say that we observe all three idealists suffering from ‘a noise of passions ringing me for dead/Unto a place where is no rest.’ Measure for Measure is a violent and sophisticated play in which almost nothing happens. As such, it is a perfect ...”

“... slaves were ‘vulnerable and powerless’. And desire between adult men was always a different matter: a normal man could desire a boy, and even sodomise him without being considered abnormal, but the ma’būn, an adult man who sought pleasure from being fucked, was thought to suffer from a dangerous and contemptible pathology.A single sexual pattern may ...”

“... lists 23 other Colette biographies published since the 1950s – the most recent in English being Herbert Lottman’s from 1991.) Thurman seems to have a thing, it is true, for scary, sensual, heavily made-up female geniuses. Her first book was a prize-winning life of Isak Dinesen, another fabled monster of maquillage. But she also has the sure sense of self ...”

“... the Republican Party claiming mass popular support because much of the map is coloured red, no matter how sparsely populated the area in question. The usefulness of calling the Comanche an empire becomes less clear when one considers that at the height of their power they numbered forty thousand people – the population at the time of Cincinnati.At times ...”

“... gaily across the water: “Now we know where we are! No more bloody allies!”’ The writer A.P. Herbert recorded that. And it was briefly a widespread feeling in England in the summer of 1940. Belgium gone, Holland, now France … horror and pity, but also a sort of relief. And if the UK really does barge out of the European Union this Halloween, many ...”

“... or Twitter for all of thirty seconds while you look at it. Actually visiting the thing is another matter, and at least two of the books that use the image are written (or rather, compiled) by people who haven’t. If they had, they might have noticed that the building is as pedestrian-unfriendly as it is photogenic – the only easy way to see it as a whole ...”