“... is as little mystery about the Grand Canal as about our local thoroughfare, and the name of St Mark is as familiar as the postman’s ring. The postman always rings twice, and there is much mystery in McEwan. The name of St Mark does not ring once, despite his elaborated descriptions of ‘one of the great tourist ...”

“... d’Oro of embossed gold studded with gems, and adorned with enamels, in the Basilica of Saint Mark in Venice. Very few altarpieces like the Pala d’Oro have survived, but such works in precious metal, together with equally precious textiles, were the most highly-prized type of altarpiece. Panel paintings with backgrounds of gold leaf were intended as ...”

“... Oslo to study at the university at Blindern’ – but the focus soon shifts to Paul, and then to Jan Brosten, ‘with whom Paul would eventually become strongly linked’, and from there to a whole fistful of characters luxuriating in the possession of both first and last names, commodities strictly rationed elsewhere, and withheld even from the title ...”

“... and thereby denied them legal recognition of their gender. In 1986, female-to-male transsexual Mark Rees, in the first challenge to the ruling, lost his case at the European Court of Human Rights against the UK government for its non-recognition of his status as male, loss of privacy and barring his marriage to a woman. Only with the Gender Recognition Act ...”

“... in the Americas. The Moravian Brethren, who settled in Saxony after the execution of their leader Jan Hus, had become energetic missionaries by the 19th century, venturing as far afield as the Himalayas, where they engaged in ethnographic research in Ladakh and Tibet. German scientists were equally well travelled: not only Alexander von Humboldt, who ...”

“... time he published this book. Since then São Paulo and Mumbai must also have hit the 20 million mark, with Delhi fast approaching it. Concentric sprawl at the edges of discrete metropolitan centres is not the only model of substandard housing growth. There is also the built-up corridor, which takes shape as the hinterlands between smaller and larger cities ...”

“... and send someone, perhaps a young servant like Jacob Jackson of Hurworth in County Durham, to mark their ears so that you knew which were yours (theft was common), and paint them with tar to keep them warm through the winter and spring. In June they would be brought down from the pastures and washed in a river before being sent to the shearing men. If you ...”

“... further raised over that grave with trees planted on it. The second is from the Egyptologist Jan Assmann, at the start of his book Death and Salvation in Ancient Egypt (2005): The thesis that underlies this study can be reduced to an extremely simple formula: death is the origin and the centre of culture … When it comes to the importance of ...”

“... exactness: it continues in the fictions of Italo Calvino, Douglas Adams, Roberto Bolaño and Mark Z. Danielewski, among many others. The Polish science fiction writer and author of Solaris, Stanisław Lem, wrote long introductions to four imaginary books in Imaginary Magnitude (1973) and a whole volume of reviews of non-existent books, A Perfect Vacuum ...”

“... banns, cemetery and baptismal registers – these interconnections amount to evidence of what Mark Ponte, whose archival work has brought them to light, calls an Afro-Atlantic community in 17th-century Amsterdam, established in the eastern part of the city in the area around the Jodenbreestraat. Sephardic Jews fleeing persecution in Portugal and Spain had ...”

“... groupings – the Leiden School, the School of Delft or the Dutch Italianate tradition. And Jan Steen hangs alone.) In place of moral messages we have, so we are told, reflections of attitudes towards peasant, soldier, professional or wife. Ostade’s peasants are not warning us off violence, drink or lust, but are showing us how the superior classes ...”

“... those familiar scenes to be enjoyed in the paintings of Pieter de Hooch and Metsu, Nicolaes Maes, Jan Steen and so many others – can no longer be considered as merely the products of a new ‘bourgeois realism’, reflecting self-satisfied pride of possession. It is often possible to show, not just that a single figure, seemingly based on the most direct ...”

“... operation’ where these ‘competitive models of the historicity of form’ could be juxtaposed. Jan van Eyck, for example, declared the category of the secular portrait through a slight deviation from the type of the sacred icon, and so advanced the new value of authorship within and against the old model of substitution. It is such patterns, Nagel and Wood ...”

“... advantage of the Zulu War and strike in Central Asia – or even send arms to the Zulus. The young Jan Smuts, conscious of this Russian interest, advised his Boer colleagues on the eve of war to prevail on the Russians to foment an anti-British rising in India. In fact, Kruger, thinking along similar lines, had already sent the Russian émigré financier ...”

“... What is the secret of Czech tennis, what with Drobny and his doubles partner Czernik, leading to Jan Kodes (Wimbledon, 1973), Ivan Lendl (the greatest mechanic of the professional era, a hero to my son’s generation, a fore-runner of tennis’s decline to mine), Navratilova, Mecir, Kucera, and several other gifted champions? By contrast, why has British ...”