“... 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 no more than a moment since the recent commemorations of May 1968 – fifty up – were superseded by the anniversary of the June Days in Paris in 1848.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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... as an academic discipline in Britain, I encounter the kind of baffled, pitying look likely to be provoked by saying I’ve spent the last ten years building a scale model of Westminster Abbey out of matchsticks. The idea of such a history seems to strike many people as at once unrealistically ambitious and largely ...”

“... is how to use the first line to answer two questions: how did the ‘great melody’ come to be uttered; and what exactly was ‘it’? Yeats answered the latter: Whether they knew or not, Goldsmith and Burke, Swift and the Bishop of Cloyne All hated Whiggery; but what is Whiggery? A levelling, rancorous, rational sort of mind That never looked out of ...”

“... fighting against exploitation’, were ‘our allies in the struggle for a new society’ and must be given self-government at the earliest opportunity. Meanwhile, the war itself was ‘part of a world revolution of the common man, aimed at a new world of plenty and security’. Paul Addison, in Now the war is over, an excellent book derived from a good TV ...”

“... First two and the last of these themes – poetry, sociability and sexual adventure, to call them by other names – commemorate activities which enabled him in youth, as did his drinking, to face the prospect of a lifetime’s hard labour on the land. After just such a life, his own auld farmer addressed his auld mare in these words: Mony a sair darg we twa ...”