“... mosaics, and roofed with gilded tiles, almost all sadly destroyed by Allied bombing during World War Two, and not discussed by Winterling (a few remaining fragments are on show in the Palazzo Massimo Museum in Rome). Caligula’s preoccupation with a high standard of living accommodation is also implied by the philosopher Philo’s wonderfully vivid account ...”

“... who, having volunteered for the Red Cross, was stationed in Alexandria during the First World War. He arranged the first translations of Cavafy’s work into English and made it known to such figures as T.S. Eliot and D.H. Lawrence. Here is Forster’s description of Cavafy: a Greek gentleman in a straw hat, standing absolutely motionless at a slight ...”

“... Beuret with Sackville-West, his international success had carried him far from his working-class origins, and even further from those of the provincial peasant who still shared his life. Most accounts of Beuret date from his years of fame, when gossip dismissed her as a ‘little washerwoman without any capacity for communication with him’ (Edmond de ...”

“... that estimates of the killings of ethnic Albanians were wildly exaggerated in the prelude to the war (100,000 against a verified total of 3000, according to a recent report). Whatever else is to be made of Milosevic’s recent replacement (by another hardline Serb nationalist), it’s not plausibly seen as an outpouring of gratitude by the Serbian people ...”

“... judges and the Recorder of London. Sometimes he won, which encouraged him. When the First World War broke out he saw an opportunity to initiate a witchhunt against his former friends and acquaintances and wrote a satirical pamphlet which informed wartime Britain: ‘Two foes thou hast, one there one here,/One far one ultimately near,/Two filthy fogs blot ...”

“... 1917 in 1066,’ a Russian diplomat was once said to have told his British counterpart. The ruling class of England, and much of the rest of Britain, was re-created by the Norman Conquest. Most of the nobly born have at one time or another sought to find progenitors among the Companions of the Conqueror, and the words ‘noble’, ‘gentle’ and ...”

“... a military prison in Jaroslaw, Poland, close to the Eastern front, in the last months of the Great War; he had been found guilty of theft and espionage, and was probably executed in mid-1918. The subtitle of the book summarises him as a ‘racketeer and psychopath’, but a more extensive curriculum vitae assembled by van Onselen lists the following ...”

“... a devoted reader of Clausewitz, and with Becker-Ho he later devised a board game called Game of War). ‘Strategist’ has the right ambiguity, too, for the lines between actual politics, group positioning and individual posturing are not always clear to a reader now – were they, one wonders, to Debord then? What is clear, however, is his keen sense of ...”

“... that the content of the papers reflects the values and interests of a relatively small, literate class. In polls, some 60 per cent of the population say unemployment is their primary concern, yet it occupied a mere 0.7 per cent of press coverage during the campaign. Johnson has little regard for competing scholarship, particularly in the fields of ...”

“... to explain that my ‘conference budget’ didn’t stretch to the $75,000 speaker fee and first-class return airfare. Ariely is not a typical academic. He has given very popular Ted talks, sells consultancy advice on behavioural prediction and has founded a number of companies to profit from his insights into the vagaries of human decision-making. The focus ...”

“... on Stan Douglas’s film and video installation Suspiria (2003) and Rob Halpern’s book of war poems, Music for Porn (2012). Suspiria, we are told, ‘pits’ the gimmick of a conspicuously old-fashioned Technicolor palette against the ‘sublime’ effects created by the installation’s endlessly looping and randomising ‘recombinant ...”

“... in a much sunnier mood (though it failed to treat their TB). This was iproniazid, a drug from a class known at MAO-inhibitors, the antecedents to the SSRIs and SNRIs widely prescribed today. There are many such stories. These drugs must at first have appeared miraculous. And they illuminated, to a degree, the role of neurochemicals in the brain. Yet, as ...”

“... by Catholic appointees. And yet Flora emerged as an adored celebrity. During the Second World War, hundreds of young women who sheltered partisans or Allied airmen died in concentration camps. But in Georgian Britain, brutal enough to the lower orders, a good-looking girl with presentable manners touched a sporting reflex in upper-...”

“... them in poor countries, creating generations of climate refugees that will make today’s Syrian war refugee crisis look like a high school drama production.’ There is no longer any doubt that the rise in global sea levels will reshape human civilisation. Goodell focuses on the city, that unit of human organisation small enough to have local leaders ...”

“... which her usual tone is one of casual irony – contain trenchant expressions of disdain for the class dynamics which rendered her a ‘poverina’ among the ‘predatory rich’, welcomed into their midst as long as she remained ‘continually entertaining and at their disposal’. Greene was the chief breadwinner for her family, supporting her mother and ...”