“... picture on them. Yet Kircher went wrong on almost every point of fact, and some of his mistakes may not have been innocent. The marble tablet that first informed him he had made a miraculous discovery has disappeared without trace. Indeed, it may never have existed, and no other physical evidence connects the church to ...”

“... about.She doesn’t get accepted onto the seminar. Selin notices things, but although they may be notable in themselves, they aren’t always the sort of thing other people think matters. In another interview, for an art class, the instructor looks over her portfolio while she stares out of the window ‘at two squirrels running up a tree. One squirrel ...”

“... posted on social media likening Xi to Winnie the Pooh. New translations or illustrated versions may well be denied an ISBN, and so may existing editions: ISBNs have to be renewed every five to ten years, depending on the contract. Ricardo Piglia’s Plata Quemada was abandoned by the publisher after the translation was ...”

“... did he do it? That’s the question for which Kotkin has no real answer. He concedes that Stalin may well have wanted to get rid of ‘evasive, self-serving’ bureaucrats and replace tired, ill-educated Old Bolsheviks with young promotees with better education, but, as Kotkin rightly points out, ‘Stalin faced no imperative to murder them. He could sack or ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... at Viv’s birthday party, who wears an elaborate costume in keeping with the undersea theme but may not be on the guest list. The two timeframes, only marginally out of phase, fold smoothly into each other when the narrative of Molly’s work day catches up with her evening panic and its aftermath. At this point Phillips starts to hold back the momentum. It ...”

“... their mainland counterparts. The opposite, equally well-attested effect – island gigantism – may explain the giant Hatzegopteryx. Both processes are observable in the long history of Europe’s island faunas. Millions of years later, during the Pleistocene period, numerous Mediterranean islands, including Crete, Malta and Sicily, were home to an ...”

“... quotes Mill’s wonderful remark about the ‘deep slumber of a decided opinion’, and we may well think that they also serve who only sit and sleep. For both Prendergast and Catherine Gallagher, the counterfactual is not any old fantasy but an alarm call for those who have been sleeping too long or too comfortably. There are attractions and risks in ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... his view of Macron’s presidency. Whoever was responsible for Moret’s arrest – and it may well have been Darmanin – has pressed the right button: the thought is as good as the deed. At rallies and marches, physical policing à la Darmanin, with its bristling ranks of law enforcers, feels more intimidating than his taste for ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... upwards, downwards and outwards from unitary national authorities. The core of these questions may be summarised as follows. Is ‘sovereignty’ a starkly juridical concept with the same timeless properties in all conceivable political regimes, or is it a contingent entity deeply enmeshed in the historical process? Is sovereignty located in a ...”

“... postcode: Herscht 07769, ‘signalling, as it were, the confidential nature of this matter’. He may as well be naming a quasar or a galaxy.At the post office, Herr Volkenant and his wife, Jessica, warn Herscht that he is throwing away his eighty cents each time. Like almost everyone in Kana, they’re protective of the soft-headed ‘kid grown to giant ...”