“... new one for Virilio: it was sketched out in his L’Art du moteur, a bestseller four years ago in France. Though the provision of detailed evidence is hardly the forte of Open Sky, Virilio does back up the claim that the body is being industrialised by examining advances in ophthalmology. This is why the book is interested in free-fall: the visual experiences ...”

“... the entirely fictional one of the monastery of San Michele in Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose. Since the layout of the library is so important to the plot of the novel, it has been possible for fans to count the number of rooms, calculate the number of shelves, and estimate the number of volumes the library contained – it comes to about ...”

“... seen in England and that the same fleecy cirrocumulus that presaged fair weather in England and France augured heavy rain in Italy. Studied close up by local observers, nature looked motley, however hard leading scientists in London and Paris pressed for standardised data that could be distilled into generalisations about weather everywhere and always. The ...”

“... down Neville Chamberlain. When, in September 1939, Arthur Greenwood, the acting Labour leader, rose to reply to Chamberlain’s ludicrously inadequate response to Hitler’s invasion of Poland, he began by saying he would speak for the Labour Party, but Amery, unable to control himself, burst out with ‘Speak for England!’ (In Alan Bennett’s Forty ...”

“... Israel’s destruction of Palestine. The campaign (which has been quite successful in Germany and France) was launched after the reinvasion of the West Bank three years ago, after the devastation of Jenin (which capitulated, to the great pride of the Israeli army, on Holocaust Day 2002). The language that pro-Israelis and representatives of Israel use to ...”

“... served as usual with French bread, warm croissant, café au lait and Fort Dauphin’s speciality, rose-pink papaya. The terrace is set about with hibiscus and orchids. A ten-foot poinsettia tree holds both cream-coloured and scarlet flowers over my head. In front of me spreads the great fan of a Traveller’s Palm, symbol of Madagascar. Wendy, my colleague ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... a year in a labour camp before Czernowitz came under Soviet control again in 1943. He moved to France in 1948 and settled in Paris, where he continued to write poetry in his native German. In 1970 he drowned himself in the Seine. Celan was not literally a poet of the epitaph, but there is a sense in which his poems, with their stress on negation, their ...”

“... if not Ronald Reagan. Hoping to reclaim the prodigal for the theatre, the Broadway producer Billy Rose addressed an open letter to him: ‘Listen, Thunder-in-the-Mountains, isn’t it about time you made up your mind whether you’re Senator Pepper, D.W. Griffith or Kupperman the quiz kid?’ He did undertake theatrical projects after this, notably a ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... with him, charged with the intention to ‘corrupt and debauch’ her. Colonel Forbes fled to France, and a £50 reward was offered for information leading to his arrest, together with a description: ‘about 64 years of age, five feet nine or ten high, florid complexion, stout made, grey hair, thick bushy whiskers, which he sometimes dyes, walks very ...”

“... at risk of famine, and 900,000 children were at critical risk. As the cost of a 25 kg bag of wheat rose to $415, there were stories of Palestinians eating grass. People I spoke to who had left Gaza told me that their relatives were going without food for days on end. As the situation deteriorated, there were reports of looting. Israel has repeatedly blamed ...”

“... antidote, a large irony given Wodehouse’s career after being captured by the Germans in France (where he’d been living when war broke out) as a colleague of Joyce’s on the German side. A good part of Joyce’s appeal lay in an on-air personality that projected a dangerous sense of fun: ‘And where is the Ark Royal?’ he would regularly ...”