“... of evanescent beings’, only to round off the paragraph by observing that Margaret Parker ‘took evanescence to the limit by dying’. Biographer and subject could hardly be closer in step than they seem while Byron is pursuing his fashionable conquests in England, and debonairly describing them to his Cambridge men friends and to his favourite woman ...”

“... Christmas Crackers, the entertaining commonplace chapbooks he compiled yearly from 1969 to 2019, John Julius Norwich established as a principle that each quotation, however short, must appear alone on a page. If it couldn’t stand up to that spotlight, it shouldn’t be included. Offill’s marooned paragraphs are bathed in a more forgiving light, but they ...”

“... from Terry Nation, called ‘The Daleks’. From the moment one appeared, sucker first, the show took off. The designer, Raymond Cusick, might have been briefed to construct a toy from left-over parts in a factory, the rubber sucker, the wrench-like pincer, the silver pimples, the flashing lights. But his ideas were also strikingly with it, a little bit Arne ...”

“... of itself,’ he says in his Study of Thomas Hardy, a sentiment which might have been uttered by John Stuart Mill himself. But what Lawrence meant by ‘self’ was not to be confused with the ‘cheap egotism’ of the ‘self-conscious little ego’ described by modern individualism. ‘I know that life, and life only, is the clue to the ...”

“... to combat or contain it – or, as the realist theorists like the late Chalmers Johnson and John Mearsheimer demand, to make the United States dismantle its bases, get out of the rest of the world, and operate at a global level only if it is actually threatened as a country. Many realists in the United States argue that such a withdrawal is ...”

“... broken the rules. Instead, his time in the field was treated as a model for others to follow; he took on the job of monitoring future officers and made sure they did as he would have done. Since leaving the police in 2008, he has been teaching terrorism studies at St Andrews and has become known as a campaigner against racism and Islamophobia. It is a ...”

“... over several years. For instance, I was almost sure I would tackle the distinguished art critic John Russell’s Paris (1960), ‘with photographs by Brassaï’, but never got past the pictures. I had slightly less confidence about Maxime Du Camp’s six-volume Paris, ses organes, ses fonctions et sa vie dans la seconde moitié du XIXe siècle ...”

“... after the death of the poet Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson (another Nobel laureate) in 1910; and clearly took it seriously. It gave him an opportunity to influence Norwegian society. So all those novels about the flight from the countryside and the corruption brought about by city life and the English were more than explorations of the psyche: they were intended as ...”

“... the idea of universal human rights with the greatest vigour in the 1940s. But when New Labour took power in 1997, with its talk of human rights and ethical foreign policy, its future role as a quasi-colonial power was somehow not anticipated. Equally unanticipated was the long reach of Article 3, with its prohibition of torture and inhuman or degrading ...”

“... Last Easter, my family and I took a holiday house in the West Highlands. The windows of the cottage looked onto a salt marsh, and beyond that, to the fast-moving waters of the Kyles of Lochalsh. Across the waters rose the hills of southern Skye, still dusted with snow. Nearby stood the unloved stone ruin of a barracks built to house government troops engaged on the Highland-suppressing project that followed Culloden ...”

“... guests, perfecting a culture of easy informality between the sexes. Laura – and later Margot – took something of the Glen’s bracing air and surprising intimacy to London society when they were triumphantly launched there in the early 1880s: Mary Elcho, Laura’s best friend and a prominent Soul, remembered ‘a plunge, a splash as of a bright pebble ...”

“... later. In his youth, Naipaul recounts, he believed that ‘things ran their course; elections took place, and the United States and Great Britain continued much as they had done.’ This otherwise incomprehensible indifference to current events is seen by him in 2007 as possessing one major virtue: ‘When I began to travel I saw places fresh.’ But has ...”

“... These three novels came out in 1907, 1908 and 1909 with the firm of Bruno Cassirer (who later took on Wolfgang Koeppen). They represent Walser probably at the zenith of what it seems a mistake to call a career in anything but the most literal (or punning) sense. Walser was living in Berlin, sometimes in the house of his brother Karl, a famous and ...”

“... but no supervisor came to negotiate with them. Instead, guards opened fire. Demonstrators then took to the streets of Lusaka, Zambia’s capital, where they targeted Chinese-owned businesses and held a rally outside the Chinese Embassy. Hu had planned to visit Zambia’s copper-producing region, where he was to lay the cornerstone of a new stadium financed ...”

“... The Salsette, a P&O steamship of 6000 tons, was torpedoed and sunk by a U-boat on 20 July 1917. John Liddiard, a British diver forever in search of a new discovery, says that the Salsette is ‘the Mecca of South Coast wreck-diving. Ask any Weymouth skipper and it seems that just about every charter group wants to dive this one.’ Robert Louis ...”