“... which were taking place in the Belgian Congo. Who could foresee his own terrible fate during the war as he stood in our drawing room passionately denouncing the cruelties he had seen? Conrad’s biographer Frederick Karl is unsure when this visit took place, but if we are to believe Casement’s Black Diary – and Angus Mitchell, who has edited The Amazon ...”

“... American by dint of having lived in the United States followed by service in the Army during World War One. Partly because this alternative was not only implausible but imposed on me, I found it far from convincing. To say ‘I am an American citizen’ in the setting of an English school, with wartime Cairo dominated by British troops and what seemed to me a ...”

“... Hunchback of Notre Dame): Hitler had just invaded Poland. Two days later, France declared war on Germany. In 1946, backed by a socialist mayor, Raymond Picaud, and funded by the Confédération Générale du Travail (which still sits on the board, to little effect) and local unions – restaurateurs, hoteliers and even bakers – and following a huge ...”

“... Larache.‘One time,’ R.D. said, ‘Yasin broke his foot. He came up the stairs to our science class on his crutches. He comes in, one foot in a cast and on the other he had a Moroccan slipper, like a belgha, a thing you’d only wear at home, this round thing made of leather. All the Moroccans knew what it was and we laughed. So everyone remembers the ...”

“... the distant source of the Mallory, a mysteriously ambiguous waterway which brings disease and war as it irrigates the arid wastes of the Sahara. Dr Mal, as he is now called, Sanger and Noon make their way through familiar Ballardian landscapes, their vision sharpened and estranged by the waterborne fly fever. Their craft is a stolen car ferry, allusively ...”

“... documented but imaginatively embroidered pursuit of ‘magnificent real facts’ in The War of the End of the World (first published in 1981), based on a bizarre and violently stirring episode in Brazilian history which had already been greatly recorded in Euclides da Cunha’s Os Sertoes; or into the bewildering elaboration of revolutionary ...”

“... April 1968; Dayton, where John Scopes was convicted in 1925 for teaching evolution to his biology class. Tennessee still stumbles under the burden of being a Civil War battleground (the East was loyal to the Union while the Midwest supported the Confederacy) and the state government works hard to overcome this legacy of ...”

“... healthy bodies and ancient Greeks was not unfamiliar to the British, the males of whose ruling class had been plunging naked into icy streams for decades. And the style of this painting, with its resolutely unsensuous handling of paint and crisply distinguished bands of light on the lake, can be found in British as well as German painting. Hanging opposite ...”

“... since been regarded as their immemorial subject. Soon the tango spread. In the years before World War One it was the new social dance in Europe and North America. At this point, not surprisingly, musicians back in Buenos Aires began to worry that the form was becoming diluted by the gringos – agringado. By the Twenties Argentine tango bands had split into ...”

“... Romantic prejudice. When Marilyn Butler published a book some years ago called Jane Austen and the War of Ideas, the very title was fighting talk: ideas, in the mannerly Austen? Charles Dickens is nowhere more unregenerately English than in his genial philistinism, allergic to anything that smacks of the doctrinal rather than the affective, while Thackeray was ...”

“... these views. The revolt within economics against the naive Keynesian expansionism of the post-war era has been based largely on a welcome rejection of the idea that governments can deceive citizens permanently into ignoring the decline in the value of their currency. So a degree of professional scepticism towards Akerlof is understandable, even if the ...”

“... So there was much to work for in 1984, and much to look forward to. Now, four years on, middle-class Hong Kong Chinese people talk, over the dinner table, not about property prices, as in Britain, but about emigration. There is scarcely a soul who does not possess a relative or a friend who is emigrating to Canada, or to Australia, or the United ...”

“... but what instead did I want it to sound like? Schwartz made his mark just before the Second World War when Modernism was at its most popular, and it was in this tradition that Allen Tate saw his first book, In dreams begin responsibilities, when it came out in 1938, hailing it as ‘beyond any doubt the first real innovation we’ve had since Eliot and ...”

“... labour. Placed against Käthe Kollwitz’s later etchings of fierce rural women in The Peasants’ War, Courbet comes up short. Yet still she comes back to him, as if she cannot give up on the hope of finding some kinship with the painter who was revolutionary in so much else. At first, she falters. Usually Nochlin is a confident and straightforward writer who ...”

“... true, as Lady Mary once claimed, that she ‘never printed a single line in my Life’, both her class and her sex fed her profound ambivalence about publishers. Most of what she wrote circulated only in manuscript; the few significant exceptions appeared anonymously, except when others chose to attach her name, accurately or not, to a poem or ...”