“... have preached, are supposed to have been masters of a profitable trade route in spices, there is little or no good evidence for this spice route in the seventh century and Mecca would not have been well placed to control it in any case. Moreover, though the Quraysh and other Arab tribes are supposed to have been pagans, if one reads the Koran carefully there ...”

“... novels, RPF (Real Person Fiction). Geraldine Brooks’s March, a novel which sees the events of Little Women from the perspective of the girls’ father, and which won the Pulitzer Prize? Faaan fiction.Fan fiction gave me hours of free entertainment, repetitive strain injury and an introduction to new worlds (it’s where I first read about Sherlock Holmes ...”

“... Between 1896 and 1907, the Oxford Egyptologists Bernard Grenfell and Arthur Hunt spent six seasons digging the low, sandy mounds surrounding the village of el-Behnesa, a hundred miles south of Cairo and ten miles west of the Nile. In concentrating on the ancient town of Oxyrhynchos (literally, ‘city of the sharp-nosed fish’), they were not aiming to uncover another set of impressive ruins that could rival those of Leptis Magna, Ephesus or Pompeii ...”

“... if Paris hadn’t existed. Robb presents us initially with a country that in some ways had changed little since Roman times. Until well into the 19th century, France was less a nation than a set of tribes that inhabited a vast, seemingly empty space and spoke numerous mutually incomprehensible languages. Although things had begun to change, especially after ...”

“... the League, too. Its Secretary-General was Sir Eric Drummond; the President of the Conference was Arthur Henderson. Kennedy’s special concern was to see how Germany could be restored to a safe level of defensive military capability within the framework of the universal disarmament that Versailles had promised. In those early months, ignorance about Hitler ...”

“... notes, to find that Yeats’s Via Americhe has changed its name, like much in Rapallo. Even the little boulevard by the beach, where Yeats watched Pound feeding the stray local cats, is now called Via Gramsci, which would please neither poet’s ghost. And though there are plaques on all the apartments that housed the resident luminaries, nothing adorns 12 ...”

“... handwritten revisions and instructions with which Constable besieged Lucas: ‘two near crows a little too large’; ‘put a little smoak about the Cottages’. (After Constable’s death, the quality of the prints collapsed.) Artists could grow quickly famous – and wealthy – via prints of their paintings; Joshua ...”

“... Gerald Feinberg, a physics professor at Columbia and a great science fiction fan, recommended Arthur C. Clarke. Clarke was not very well-known then, but I set about reading everything he had written and found that I liked it a great deal. I wrote an enthusiastic article, and soon after it appeared I got a note from Clarke saying he was coming to New York ...”

“... by the Sackvilles, was, in fact, a marriage of social equals. Nicolson was the younger son of Sir Arthur, 11th Baronet, later created a peer for his services in the Foreign Office as Permanent Under-Secretary 1910-16. Harold’s Hamilton grandmother owned a stately home in Co. Dublin. His uncle by marriage was the Marquess of Dufferin and Ava, Viceroy of ...”

“... 14 May 1752: ‘In his own time Timothy Dwight was a figure of towering significance.’ Arthur Murphy, born in Clomquin, Roscommon, 27 December 1727: his comedy The Upholsterer was produced in 1758, Alzuma in 1773. And while we are on the drama, let us remember James Robinson Planché, born in Piccadilly, London on 27 February 1796, who is part of ...”

“... deeply grateful to her for looking after him and gently restraining him from drinking more than a little too much. They were walking just off Lexham Gardens with his sister when he was struck by a car driven fast round the corner by the sort of young man who frequented his own style of Kensington saloon bar. Injuries were severe, and though he got over them ...”

“... not really explain. It comes as a surprise to Anglo-Saxons, reading the Kama Sutra, to find so little jokiness, so much order and philosophy, put into sexual manners; and something of the same kind is true with table manners. Here, according to Japanese teaching, are the seven kinds of bad manners with chopsticks: neburi-bashi, or licking chopsticks with ...”

“... stressed the superiority of Ideal Love to passion) and the household life with his ‘darling little wifey’ and her mother to which Poe clung in the extremes of poverty. His comic-pathetic pursuit of other women after Virginia’s death was carried out partly in an attempt to replicate the family household (he took it for granted that Virginia’s ...”

“... The message he intended to convey was that Mrs Thatcher’s government was displaying too little compassion in its treatment of the miners. It was a message that nine historians out of ten would have been only too happy to deliver. But how could Winston Churchill, with his controversial record in the General Strike, possibly be enlisted on the side of ...”

“... ejected Grau and, in a display of neighbourliness, FDR renounced the Platt Amendment. This made little difference. A new treaty reaffirmed the lease on GTMO, and, again, there was no date given for it to end. The treaty continues to provide the moral and legal justification for America’s occupation of Cuban territory. The most interesting aspect of the ...”