“... of Sikh extremism in the 1980s in Punjab, we find it has an eerie resonance with the events that took place in Washington and New York. For Mrs Gandhi, the Congress Party – a euphemism for herself and her family – represented democracy, stability and secularism; and, in order to perpetuate Congress rule, she used every undemocratic means at her ...”

“... the war, he emigrated to America, taught at Bard, participated in Harvard’s Society of Fellows, took his PhD only in 1959 (his thesis on Mallarmé and Yeats still awaits full publication), and served as a teacher at Cornell, Johns Hopkins and the University of Zurich before settling at Yale in 1970. And although his earliest essays appeared in French during ...”

“... government” ’, which defended security of tenure by violence and intimidation. A tenant who took over a farm from which the previous tenant had been evicted was violently punished. The groups who carried out the violence would now be called terrorists, but these ‘enforcers of the “unwritten law” were representatives, or in some sense agents, of ...”

“... was living at the time, and play crashing discords on the piano. Eventually, his mother came and took him away. The effect of this story, which Carpenter appears to have included simply for its strangeness, is suddenly to make us aware of how immersed we have become in the enclosed universe of the great man’s life. Biographies often give the impression ...”

“... marriageable age in the whole first generation of the Plymouth Colony’, and the ship’s cooper, John Alden, whom she chose over the colony’s military supremo, Commander Myles Standish – an episode that became the subject of a poem by Longfellow. The maternal line included heroes of the War of Independence and cousins who fought on opposing sides in the ...”

“... has many precedents, but what was remarkable this time was that, two months before the coup took place, a plan describing almost the exact course of events was leaked to the press. The plot had been rumbled, but it succeeded anyway.Where was the civil and political opposition? The religious conservative Ennahda Party, still the best organised political ...”

“... is also a vast outpouring of Bach recordings, which, until DGG curtailed the series, included John Eliot Gardiner’s amazing cantata performances. One of these took place every week for a year all over Europe and North America – the intention was to match the composer’s own Sunday series for the churches he served ...”

“... proved adept at finding a range of love nests in Amherst, and even, or so their diaries suggest, took to experimenting with group sex.* As soon as Emily was no longer alive to prevent it, Austin made over to the Todds a plot of land on which they built a thirteen-room house called the Dell, where Austin, Mabel and her husband, David, established what seems ...”

“... wavelength makes possible the denser packing of information on CD discs, but last year Nakamura took his ingenuity to the University of California, Santa Barbara – part of a brain drain that a stagnating Japan cannot afford.Something even more fundamental seems to be inhibiting the Japanese economy. ‘We have the bad luck to be in the downward phase of ...”

“... highlight seems to have been seeking out the reclusive philosophical eminence F.H. Bradley, who took time to show him around Merton College.After his Oxford stay, William went to see his brother Henry in Rye, where he was very excited to learn that G.K. Chesterton was staying at the inn next door. Intensely curious to see what Chesterton looked like, and ...”

“... father to take over from him. It seems to have been happy enough, but we cannot know as Kauffman took care to burn all her papers before she died.Of the three it was Cosway, born in 1760, who had the strangest start in life. Her parents, Charles and Isabella Hadfield, had settled in Florence where they ran an inn, Carlo’s, on the left bank of the ...”

“... but there is no plaque, or anything like that. When their father died in 1933, Beckett’s brother took over the business, while Beckett, who was idling at the time, took the attic room. Like all idlers, he made many promises. He promised himself that he would write and he promised his mother that he would give language ...”

“... to resign and others, including the head of the SDECE (France’s equivalent of MI6 at the time), took early retirement. The state and the deep state are not two things but all of a piece, in what we call democracies as well as in dictatorships. Talk of the deep state in Egypt suggested that its discovery was an unpleasant surprise, which indicates a good ...”

“... will crumble and where the new frontiers will coalesce. Medawar’s ‘genius’, his colleague John Maynard Smith told me, ‘was a bit unexpected. He had a genius for thinking of the right experiment which I enormously envy. I don’t have it myself: I never think of the right experiment. If I do an experiment at all, it’s usually the wrong one. Nor did ...”

“... and name-dropping. Not surprisingly, Lowell was not amused. The same disapproval fills his ‘John Wain’s Letters to Five More Artists’. The target is not just the peculiarly discursive poetry Wain invented in Wildtrack and its sequel, but the poet himself, who is presented as lacking proportion in marshalling great past artists to his ...”