“... of capturing one elusive green ray; he planted flowers so that a month later an actor could pick a rose; he posted mail to a false address to check a plot point that rested on a letter not reaching its destination. But when it came to shooting he abandoned himself to the moment. In 24 feature films made over half a century he rarely did two takes of a ...”

“... trials, half of which resulted in convictions, except during witch panics, when the rate usually rose. Not all communities bothered with the law. In 1705 in the fishing village of Pittenweem in Fife a mob set about Janet Cornfoot, who they believed had cast spells on the community. They dragged her to the harbour, hung her by the ankles, pelted her with ...”

“... aid offered to them in their struggle by the West,’ the Times said of the Libyan rebels who rose up against Gaddafi during the Arab Spring in 2011; Western military intervention on behalf of the rebellion was ‘a good deed in a weary world’. Today, more than five years after Gaddafi’s fall in October 2011, Libya has been relegated to that class of ...”

“... are illuminating. His conviction that Wolsey’s policies were not affected by his pension from France – which was anyway a meagre proportion of his income – is given weight by his comparison of the 16th-century pension with the 20th-century business lunch. Both sweeteners may reinforce motives of policy: neither will be a substitute for them. Gwyn’s ...”

“... of GDP on fixed investment than the United Kingdom: Australia, Austria, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Turkey and the United States. Belgium spent a smaller share of GDP on fixed income than the United Kingdom. Comparable figures for other OECD ...”

“... as the ninth Marquess of Queensberry lay dying in his magnificent house in town, Emile Zola in France lovingly dusted the medal he had received a fortnight earlier for his services in the Dreyfus affair, and thousands of miles away Mafeking awoke to its hundred-and-first day of siege.’ Almost any historical novel that happened to concern itself with the ...”

“... École Libre des Sciences Politiques in 1872. The school was a direct response to the Commune, to France’s humiliation in the Franco-Prussian War, and to a sense that its ruling class was bereft of talent, industry and imagination, its imperial and cultural mission a shambles. The university now known as Sciences Po was established as a new ‘crossroads of ...”

“... to gain their freedom. Thanks to the active sponsorship of Russia and Britain, Austria and France, these groups won autonomy and then independence. By the end of the 19th century, Christendom had regained much of Ottoman Europe as well as the fringes of the Black Sea and the Caucasus. Muslims – Circassians, Tartars, Bosnians and Turks – fled ...”

“... book draws to a close. Its title is accurate as to its content and style: ‘Diana. “You was a Rose in a Garden of Weeds.” ’ The impetuosity which explains the existence of the first part of the book damages the second, which is called ‘Voicing the Constitution’. Here Barnett sets out to ‘outline a case for reform’, opening with ‘a lengthy ...”

“... Wharton’s own library contained some four thousand of them, divided between her two houses in France. Yet in Wharton’s retrospective account of herself, the small child’s imaginative resistance to her environment precedes even the ability to decipher print. Edith had not yet learned to read when she first engaged in that ecstatic and solitary ritual ...”

“... new modish effects, so that brilliant lipstick and nail varnish also came into their own as hems rose and breasts diminished, provocative shoes appeared and whalebone vanished; and Lee Miller seemed the perfect embodiment of this new feminine ideal. Everyone was aiming at it, but Miller at 18 apparently had a cool self-assurance and a strong-willed, unforced ...”

“... hungrily at the words like a dog at pieces of raw meat’. Eventually he rose to his feet and launched into a long, ranting monologue, all the while thwacking his boot with the riding whip. Franckenstein’s servants rushed in, thinking that their employer was being attacked. After Hitler had said his piece and left, there was a long ...”

“... the Maoists. In 1990, riding the wave of democracy that had swept through Eastern Europe, Nepal rose up once more against the autocracy in a movement led by the Nepali Congress and a coalition of leftist parties that included the Maoists, but was dominated by the party that went on to become the UML. A constitution was swiftly promulgated, turning the ...”

“... pseudonym of Johann Nikolaus von Hontheim), Ludovico Muratori and Lorenzo Ganganelli, who rose to the papacy as Clement XIV, advocated a more reticent and demythologised Catholicism, which turned away from baroque militancy and vacated the political space more properly belonging to the sovereign state. In Atheism in ...”

“... the Nicene Creed, which in its English version contains the sentence ‘On the third day, [Jesus] rose again, according to the Scriptures.’ That sounds on a modern reading like a clear statement of unmediated supernatural revelation: a story of a supernatural event, described in sacred books, the Gospels of the New Testament. That is not what the text ...”