“... as to why Peter Sutcliffe behaved as he did, just the events, the family life, anecdotes that may or may not be pertinent, the pubs and their atmosphere. And we go back, or rather from the beginning of the book we go forward – from Sutcliffe’s grandparents on both sides. How else is he to explain, or attempt to ...”

“... and acting one of his favourite roles, as legal adviser. Taylor’s wife (his second) left him in May 1763 and went to live with her sister, complaining – as she was later to do in a Chancery suit – of ‘very personal Ill Usage’, and claiming she feared for her bodily safety in remaining with him. Johnson is absolutely determined not to believe this ...”

“... did not. A year after meeting Parry, she was pregnant. They got married in San Francisco on 11 May 1923 and hitchhiked to Carmel for their honeymoon.Back at Berkeley in the autumn, Parry began his MA thesis on the Iliad and the Odyssey. ‘A Comparative Study of Diction as One of the Elements of Style in Early Greek Epic Poetry’ was submitted in ...”

“... so hard to disentangle history from blame in accounts of Northern Ireland since the late 1960s. In May 1974, in the New York Review of Books, the critic Seamus Deane lambasted Conor Cruise O’Brien, then minister for posts and telegraphs in the Irish Republic’s coalition government, for implying in a previous issue that ‘the Provisional IRA began the ...”

“... were a wealth-generating beast, always raring to go, if only we’d let it.Given all this, it may come as a surprise to learn that the analysis of ‘economic growth’ in its contemporary sense is a relatively recent development. Some will say that Adam Smith was the first theorist of economic growth (a term he didn’t use), but even as late as ...”

“... sometime between 1808 and 1812. Like Goya’s better-known images of the Madrid uprising of 2 May 1808 and the bloody retribution that came after, the painting depicts the calamitous violence of the Peninsular War, which followed Napoleon’s invasion of Spain. But while Goya’s intentions are clear in El Dos and El Tres de Mayo, it is much less obvious ...”

“... amputation of several fingers, and his detoxification treatment, which started at the beginning of May 1884, had been a complete disaster. After hardly a week, Jones tells us, Freud and his colleagues Obersteiner and Exner found Fleischl lying on the floor, ‘almost senseless with pain’. Not only had Fleischl continued to take morphine, but after Freud gave ...”

“... about the ways new technologies and chemicals are already affecting our brains, and what they may do in the next few years. These chapters are very, very cautious (‘we just don’t know’). Both parts pack in an amazing amount of information, gracefully told anecdotes, and a certain amount of social-democratic ‘attitude’. But there is a ...”

“... for the last month. And that I have had what has happened incessantly in my mind. Perhaps we may meet some day, and be able to talk. I am afraid Tom’s terrific life takes all my energy, and I can only lie still and wait for it to end. With all my thoughts and wishes for you Vivien Shortly afterwards she writes to him again: I am beginning to ...”

“... On 13 May Manchester City, the club I have supported since I was a boy in the 1970s, won the Premier League, their first championship since they won the old Football League in 1968. In those days, fans stood on old, groaning terraces; there were no sponsors’ logos to compete with the badge on the players’ shirts; and to my mind at least, the game had nothing to do with money ...”

“... 70 per cent of what he hoped in his first two years. Jay Gatsby, too, kept lists, and one may be reminded of Gatsby’s ‘Platonic conception of himself’. The unsettling thing about Gatsby was that he proved to have a self-image unalterable by defeat. Since his party was badly beaten in the mid-term election on 2 November, Obama has hinted that he ...”

“... If there are general principles to literary naming, and yet everybody does it differently, then it may turn out to be a practice as mysterious as language use and as idiosyncratic as aesthetic appreciation: there may well be underlying principles, but variations may be so extensive that ...”

“... the end of the Civil War, his father was denounced to the authorities by his best friend) may lie behind this mistrustful disposition. But it is also tempting to see in his aggrieved scepticism something of the straitened epistemological circumstances of contemporary fiction, many of whose practitioners feel as little able to believe in omniscient ...”

“... to self-styled patriots but also to satirists, most recently in the New Yorker, whose issue of 28 May featured on its cover Barry Blitt’s redrawing of the Iwo Jima event with the flag at half-mast and one visibly black soldier contributing to the effort: Iraq, where the US is not doing well and where the army is made up of ‘volunteers’ from poor ...”

“... cultural difference, the nature of scientific progress, and the resources that Indian culture may still possess even though under colonial rule. It is not a romantic text, nor is it a militant call for the revival of old Hindu values. But Satyanarayana, who had a distinctly modern literary sensibility while still being wholly immersed in the long literary ...”