“... before them, Christoffel Dio and Catrina Christovi, both from Angola, were married in Amsterdam in May 1655. In the next few years, Christoffel witnessed in turn at least five marriages between men and women from Africa or of African descent: Serafina from Angola to Pieter Bruin from Brazil; Lowijs and Emanuel Alfonso to two Angolan women called Esperance and ...”

“... doings, the angels and their extraordinary powers, now mischievously recorded by Eliot Weinberger, may have helped enliven the days assigned to them. The strangeness of such religious material again and again makes it incomprehensible that such figures should be considered holy, but if you look instead at their adventures as a remedy for the ...”

“... But file-selves matter elsewhere too. The Anglosphere – the UK, Canada, the US, Australia – may have eschewed the Russian/Soviet path of a compulsory internal passport, distinct from the passport required for foreign travel, but drivers’ licences and credit records often serve the same functions, and electronic identity cards ...”

“... in its profusion of only partly co-ordinated actions and individuals. Delacroix’s canvas may be more inspiring and magnificent, but Philippoteaux’s more revealingly shows the untidiness and uncertainties of a popular upheaval.At the heart of Jonathan Beecher’s Writers and Revolution is a simple but powerful idea: to follow nine contemporary ...”

“... resist compulsion. Suspicion of official motives or even scepticism about the threat Germany posed may have bolstered their resolve: as Kelly notes, pacifist organisations in the 1930s sometimes downplayed or distrusted reports of Nazi atrocities. Kelly is less sure-footed than he might be about the political context that shaped his subjects’ views, but in ...”

“... luck, especially in the department of narrative satisfaction. And at least parts of these books may predate No Country and The Road. In his 2017 study of McCarthy’s influences, Books Are Made Out of Books, Michael Lynn Crews writes that a draft of The Passenger has been under seal at Texas State University for years. The New York Times reported that the ...”

“... given that his book on Russia and Chechnya, Beslan: The Tragedy of School No. 1 (2008), may have put him on Putin’s blacklist. Phillips claims to be above Cold War partisanship: ‘To me it didn’t seem particularly helpful to divide the world into goodies and baddies, however tempting or even pressing it can sometimes feel to do so. I could ...”

“... by irrigation farms visible in satellite images as green crop circles dotting the hamada. This may seem impressive, but Saudi reserves are tiny compared to the 650 million tonnes of grain which China has stored up. One site at Dalian, on the Liaodong Peninsula in the north-east, has 95 grain elevators, each a monument to hard memories of the mid-century ...”

“... all around her, which turn out to be protective angels.As astonishing as Margery’s experiences may be to the modern reader, she was following a familiar script. She knew about the experiences of other mystics, including the celebrity saint Bridget of Sweden, and her divine visions echoed theirs. She may even have been ...”

“... lamented ruin had become confused with an idea of salvation. As a perfect English village, Tyneham may have been destroyed, but at least it had been spared the many degradations of the post-war period. Nobody had widened the roads, fluoridated the water or filled the place with holiday bungalows. There had been no consumerism or television to foster aberrant ...”

“... Hill and Conlon books, perhaps, is the intensity of their descriptions of prison life. Innocence may sharpen the memory: at all events, there are passages in both books which have a Kafkaesque quality, chronicling as they do the doings and the passions of that vast underclass which populates Britain’s prisons. It is instructive to compare some of these ...”

“... because brashness is a necessary virtue there. He writes well, is extremely witty, and while he may or may not still be a Marxist, he certainly enjoys an opinionatedly radical cutting-edge quite sufficient to place him apart from the general run of American journalism. Moreover, he goads Americans by a scathing de haut en ...”

“... did not thus acknowledge the fictionality of its own constructions could never escape falsity. It may be that Vargas Llosa has based The Storyteller entirely on actual experiences of his; that nothing in it lacks its corresponding reality. Yet unlike many autobiographers who report, decades after the event, pages of speech as if verbatim, the narrator ...”

“... see a wrapped brie or camembert with the maker’s name, Eugene Martin, prominently displayed. It may be a parcel, of course. Without looking at the original, it is impossible to be certain, though even in reproduction the label looks printed rather than hand-printed like an address. At any rate, a parcel wouldn’t make quite the Cubist point that Gris is ...”

“... work has been an anxiety that the institutions and practices of the modern democratic state may not be sufficiently firmly anchored in the traditions of German thought and politics. He is convinced that the emancipatory potential of such a state needs to be defended against the powerful current in German philosophy and culture which views democratic ...”