“... ment [on added triangle of envelope – with ‘of’ and ‘I’ in margin].’ ‘I found it by accident,’ Werner writes, ‘in the Amherst College Library, when it fell (rose?) out of an acid-free envelope. If I had not held it lightly in my hands, I would never have suspected the manner in which it was assembled … Look at it here, flying on the page, vying with light ...”

“... wanted to harmonise all cultures. Her message had once suited the needs of American power, but by the time she met Geertz on Bali, it had fallen out of favour. Though Mead and Geertz could have sensed it only faintly, the torch was being passed between two generations of American anthropologists, from a social scientist eager to put her stamp on the ...”

“... Thomas was certainly in a bad way, his death was down to a medical blunder. He wasn’t martyred by the barbarians of the Inland Revenue: by the time he died Thomas was on the verge of being what he had never been before – a success. A collaboration with Stravinsky was planned: they were to work on an opera set in a ...”

“... an English mother who insisted that he was baptised into the Anglican Church. This turned out to be a false start. His father, Alfred, when he came home from the Franco-Prussian War, got a job as a government translator and moved his family to Paris. Satie’s mother, as well as his youngest sister, died soon after the move. Distraught, Alfred went ...”

“... expect when they go in search of the past. Some guests are content to know the place was ‘used by Henry and Anne, back in the day’, while others like to believe it was where the king spent ‘one of his many honeymoons’. Guests praise ‘a brilliant, authentic experience of castle life’ and the ease of finding the place, ‘especially if you use a ...”

“... no more than a moment since the recent commemorations of May 1968 – fifty up – were superseded by the anniversary of the June Days in Paris in 1848. No celebrations or hand-wringings for that brief, explosive insurrection, a few days after the summer solstice 170 years ago. The uprising was triggered by the closure of a ...”

“... For revolutionary intellectuals in the Third World, Sartre seemed miraculously uncontaminated by the paternalism – and hypocrisy – that gave the white left such a bad reputation. While intellectuals in the orbit of the French Communist Party were vacillating over the Algerian war of independence, he gave his unconditional support to the rebels, a ...”

“... hunt elephants, especially for sport, and that without stricter conservation measures they would be in danger of extinction. The hunters, businesspeople, colonial functionaries and military men drinking at the Tchadien found it hard to decide whether he was a whimsical idealist or a provocateur. Only Minna, a young German employed there as a hostess, signed ...”

“... of sales, made exuberant predictions about its success. ‘The launch of OxyContin tablets will be followed by a blizzard of prescriptions that will bury the competition,’ he said, according to a lawsuit recently filed against Purdue. ‘The prescription blizzard will be so ...”

“... Resistance had captured an important collaborator, who was thought to have information that would be useful to the Allies. Hampshire was sent to interrogate him. When he arrived, the head of the Resistance unit told Hampshire he could question the man, but that when he was through they were going to shoot him: that’s what they always did with these ...”

“... have for dinner – or that every pair of femurs is now nameless, as one day your own femurs will be; or that the snatches of poetry from Lamartine and verses from the Bible painted on the wall aren’t as comforting as they might be – now you are. To us, our lives are full of texture and incident and feeling, but to ...”

“... with the terrorist attacks in Paris. The long journeys, deaths, detentions and expulsions faced by the many thousands of uninvited migrants who try to reach Europe by sea or by land did not begin or end there. But the ‘refugee crisis’ is best understood as the brief period in which ...”

“... as well as crime. This impression doesn’t always arise, of course, but it is common enough to be worth exploring and this is a large part of what I want to do, with the aid of two films by Fritz Lang: The Testament of Dr Mabuse (1933) and The Big Heat (1953). Lang was born in Vienna in 1890 and died in Beverly Hills in ...”

“... Tyvek and Kevlar. It made the powder that fired the bullets and it perfected the bullet-proof vest.By the 1970s the DuPont family’s hold on Delaware was total. ‘General Motors could buy Delaware if DuPont were willing to sell it,’ Ralph Nader said. As Tim Murphy wrote last year in Mother Jones, ‘the state’s centre of gravity began to shift from the ...”

“... to mental illness and hospitalisation’) or indeed with other sorts of knowledge that might be thought fairly general (‘Totalitarian regimes seek to control every aspect of life, including writing’). Carey finds in the obligation to be brief an opportunity for droll synopsis. ‘The son of a dissolute father and ...”