“... Wobegon tend to worry about the following things. Is it time to put the storm windows up? Will Christine and Keith make it through the snow for Thanksgiving? Why does my neighbour spend all his time in that poky little shed in back of his garage? Would TV ownership reduce my chances of being one of the Elect? If I go out and pee in the snow, will the stuff ...”

“... lied as easily as he breathed. On a mission to collect a bad debt in a distant city, Ciappelletto fell ill. This disconcerted his hosts, who did not want such a scoundrel to die unconfessed in their house and bring them into disrepute. So, to ease their minds, the old scapegrace asked for a friar to whom he might make his last (and in fact his ...”

“... you pull your coat, you know you’re going to get soaked. In England, ever since Wyndham Lewis fell out with Roger Fry in 1914, ‘Bloomsbury’ has been a word that raises more hackles than hopes. To suppose that 85 years later the derisive clichés it provokes might make way for a rethink is to underestimate the tenacity of cultural stereotypes and the ...”

“... taste said to have been exacerbated by the ravages of old age, drink and an unrequited passion for Christine Deviers-Joncour, the discarded mistress of Roland Dumas. He has now published a book. The details it gives about torture and killings by the French Army and its defiant, often light-hearted tone have caused outrage (particularly in circles normally ...”

“... it would have looked as though she was still securely on her golden path. In summer 1940 she fell in love with Desmond Fitzgerald, a ‘dashing … tall, dark and handsome’ trainee barrister and lieutenant in the Irish Guards. The couple married in 1942 and settled, after Desmond’s war service (for which he was awarded the Military Cross), in ...”

“... access to an education otherwise denied. In many cases this was her father: we might think of Christine de Pizan, whose father was astrologer to Charles V of France, or Damaris Masham, whose father was Ralph Cudworth, Regius Professor of Hebrew at Cambridge from 1645. Anna Maria Van Schurman began her Latin tract on Women’s Aptitude for Knowledge and ...”

“... found Nina Hamnett next to Louis MacNeice, the maharajah of Cooch Behar next to Joan Littlewood, Christine Keeler taking advice from Lord Goodman or conversing with Leonard Blackett (the Military Cross-winning hero of the Somme – ‘she was a brave little soldier’). E.M. Forster talked to Donald Maclean, who is believed to have spent his last night in ...”

“... to write. The publisher’s deadline was 13 October 1806, the day, as it turned out, that Jena fell. To meet it and so pay the bills that he’d run up against it, not the least of which was a large one for wine, Hegel sent section after section of his only copy out through the battle lines to the printer in Bamberg as Napoleon was preparing to bombard his ...”

“... apartthe mouldering grave clothes ha & then Henrywill heft the axe once more, his final card,and fell it on the start.The circumstances of Smith’s death were not clear-cut. He had lost out when the Florida land boom went bust, and his wife, Martha, had not only embarked on an affair with their Tampa landlord, John Angus Berryman, but initiated divorce ...”

“... after the clip and gather the leftover scraps. Once the wool was off, it needed to be washed. Christine Cooper had to cull ‘about seven todds of very coarse and feeble tarry’ wool from tegs, scouring off the tar and sorting it for carding. The wool wasted in the process was called ‘twickings’ – another chance for the gleaners. Once carded and ...”

“... as a result of racist attacks; there have been 71 suicides. Athwal lists four people who jumped or fell to their deaths when they thought immigration officials had arrived to deport them. Joseph Nnalue, 31, 23/10/94, a Nigerian, died after falling from a balcony in a flat in Stockwell – police and immigration officials were calling at his flat at the time ...”

“... a section about Crachami, a lightly rewritten version of his earlier article.*More curiously, Christine Borland, one of the artists shortlisted for this year’s Turner Prize, has as one part of her exhibition at the Tate Gallery an installation devoted to the Sicilian Dwarf and the Irish Giant. The installation is called After a True Story – Giant and ...”

“... with incense, flowers, singing and processions on her feast day, another spring festival since it fell on 30 May. The liturgical calendar afforded a counterweight to the cycle of the patriotic, secular year; it was inward-looking and folkloric, the creation of a small, culturally divided country, laden with desire for a strong retrospective personality and ...”

“... gates to consider a century of turmoil in Morocco and the rise of the dungeon culture to which he fell prey. BineBine was held in Tazmamart, a remote facility on the edge of the desert. He is one of a handful of Tazmamart survivors who went on to write accounts of their experience: almost all, like BineBine, were soldiers or air force personnel who crossed ...”

“... the price of Brent crude oil (which sets the price for 80 per cent of the global petroleum trade) fell from $111 to $62. The speed and scale of the price-drop was second in recent years only to the collapse caused by the financial crisis in 2008. As export revenues crashed, the value of the ruble plummeted and domestic inflation spiked. But Moscow developed ...”