“... wandering the piers of the Vieux Port. An elderly Vietnamese woman picked him up off the rue de la Rose; he found work in a Chinese restaurant; he took refuge in a boys’ bordello, where he tried opium for the first time and lived for a year – or two, or four – using the papers of a young drowned man. Finally, two gendarmes took him back to Paris. Arnaud ...”

“... stone or rubbing sticks together. However it happened, the human control of fire made an indelible mark on the earth’s ecosystems, and marked the beginning of the Anthropocene – the epoch in which humans have had a significant impact on the planet. In Against the Grain James Scott describes these early stages as a ‘“thin” Anthropocene’, but ever ...”

“... one another, terrified that the wrong cleric had censed the pope.Amid the ruins, a new city slowly rose. Ambitious popes such as Nicholas V in the 1440s and 1450s, known for his wild spending on buildings, books and vestments, and Julius II half a century later, found ways to mark the city as their own. Nicholas fortified ...”

“... foreign policy priorities. A Protestant by conviction before his late turn to agnosticism, Rocard rose through the Parti Socialiste Unifié, which opened a dialogue with Yasir Arafat in 1969. He went on to develop ties with Mahmoud Hamshari, the PLO’s representative in Paris, who was cleared for diplomatic status by the French foreign office in 1970.Unlike ...”

“... The partisan sniping and polarisation of the Giuliani era was put on pause after 9/11 as he rose to fill the unaccustomed roles of pacifier and unifier. In the immediate shock and chaos of the destruction of the Twin Towers, he became the take-charge guy, forging dynamically through the dust and rubble of Ground Zero. His shabby decision-making had ...”

“... for the obvious reason that language changes over time. A translation that once seemed to hit the mark will later seem stale or imprecise. What’s more, in this case, there isn’t even agreement on what should count as the original text. Marxists continue to debate whether Le Capital in the first French edition should be seen as a welcome improvement on the ...”

“... this low-lying English district, a reclaimed wetland with barely a free plot above the high-water mark on a spring tide, was still building out. Surely the barrier had been built to protect lives and existing property unluckily stranded in a climate change danger zone, not to enable new houses to be built into peril? Robinson laughed. ‘In a very simplistic ...”

“... Or should I say Ms?’ I smiled weakly, as I always do, and proffered ‘Why don’t you call me Rose?’ which created a little stir, as it is not my name. On the way back Mr Simister said that he considered it a great success, more than somewhat, and was sure they were all most grateful. My hands were clammy from the touch of the science fantasists, there ...”

“... if Waller could have summoned the discipline to write more songs as fine as his ‘Honeysuckle Rose’, ‘Ain’t Misbehavin’’, ‘Keeping out of Mischief Now’, ‘Jitterbug Waltz’ and ‘Blue Turning Grey over You’, he still couldn’t have come close to satisfying the demands placed on him by his own success and the executives at RCA ...”

“... Facebook page reached six million and signatures on Ludosky’s petition passed the one million mark. Eric Drouet, a lorry driver in his thirties, went on Facebook to call for a mass blockade of the roads; the call spread; similar posts appeared on other Facebook pages. Wherever you went, drivers had a hi-vis jacket on the dashboard, to signal their ...”

“... still no plaque at the Midland Hotel, Birmingham (now rebranded as the Macdonald Burlington), to mark the spot where Enoch Powell delivered his famous speech on 20 April 1968. Yet of all the speeches delivered by British politicians in the 20th century, or come to that in the 21st, it remains the most memorable, surpassing even the snatches I can recall of ...”

“... and expensive project entailing far larger commitments than it had made thus far – Washington rose to the occasion with a sixfold increase in the value of defence equipment supplied to the kingdom. The wall, which eventually stretched for 1200 miles north-east to south-west across the territory, swung the military situation against Polisario. The valuable ...”

“... Emma ‘the original desperate housewife’, which, cheesy though it sounds, isn’t far off the mark. Madame Bovary is many things – a perfect piece of fictional machinery, the pinnacle of realism, the slaughterer of Romanticism, a complex study of failure – but it is also the first great shopping and fucking novel. At least none of those 15 translators ...”

“... strength of his eminence’, he was soon ‘laid carefully away among the heroes’, according to Mark Van Doren, the critic who is still, nearly a century on, the most persuasive of his would-be resurrectors. The same melancholy afflicts his most authoritative modern biographer, James Anderson Winn: ‘Any candid teacher of English literature must admit that ...”

“... and Budapest. Vienna itself quintupled its population during this period, reaching the two million mark by 1914. It was a city of immigrants, as multinational as the empire over which it ruled. It was a melting-pot, but only up to a point. The biggest immigrant group, the Czechs, were absorbed fairly easily, partly by coercion, as Monika Glettler points out in ...”