“... the farmyard animals she had known in Bordeaux, but found some solace in Sunday walks in the Bois de Boulogne, or outings to the Jardin des Plantes, where Raimond was eventually employed as an illustrator by the naturalist Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire.Raimond was a dreamer, and rapidly fell under the influence of various utopian socialist sects. The ...”

“... here?’ next to the lines ‘The scattered, ambushed/Flesh of labourers’ from ‘The Tollund Man’ – but no commas.My father wasn’t one to make things like this up, so the commas must be there somewhere, and it may well be that he added some other punctuation: the odd full stop, perhaps even a semi-colon or colon. Indeed, in his marginal notes to ...”

“... off the floor to safety’. In London a 24-hour courtship preceded her marriage to Wilhelm Wendt de Kerlor, a follower of Madame Blavatsky, and, in 1916, the couple decided to go to New York. It was then, in the years she spent in America during and after the First World War, that Schiaparelli found the intellectual and artistic stimulation for which she ...”

“... Domènech i Montaner used unadorned brick and industrial iron for his café-restaurant in the Parc de la Ciutadella; 16 years later he used a steel frame for his concert hall, El Palau de la Música Catalana, making it the first curtain-wall building in Spain and one of the first in the world. Both buildings sought to ...”

“... Men’.In this world, where every master must in his turn serve as somebody else’s ‘man’, to be made ‘masterless’, like the ‘houseless’ denizens of King Lear’s heath, was to suffer social annihilation: it was almost impossible to conceive of a fully human existence outside the ranks of service. A well-trained servant became, as ...”

“... that Gerry Kelly, one of Sinn Fein’s chief negotiators at Stormont, is a highly placed IRA man who is not even a member of the Party. Kelly, who was sentenced to life imprisonment after the 1973 Old Bailey bombing, may or may not be a member of the IRA army council, but he is certainly a member of Sinn Fein: he stood unsuccessfully at last year’s ...”

“... He remains one of the great outsiders and rogues in British politics: a man who lived down his earlier reputation as a radical to bring his biting sarcasm to the service of the Tories, always able to command an appreciative audience, albeit one with greater relish for his wit than respect for his political judgment ...”

“... some the only proper receptacle of knowledge about this noble organ. Thus we come to 1860, and to Paul Broca, who in these pages emerges as a faintly flawed giant on the track of hemispheric differentiation. Initially, though, it is a differentiation between front and back, rather than left and right. Broca, a Huguenot, was predisposed to localisation of ...”

“... In Paris, Péret contacted Roussel’s business manager, hoping to arrange a meeting with the man whom Louis Aragon called ‘the President of the Republic of Dreams’. Members of the Surrealist group, including Péret, had consistently championed Roussel’s expensively disastrous confrontations with good taste in Parisian theatres. At a performance of ...”

“... passing sense of who she was. As each of her affairs in turn went wrong, she moved to a different man. This was a pattern she repeated until late middle age. Then she made do on her own. Angela Carter said of Lulu’s men: ‘Desire does not so much transcend its object as ignore it completely in favour of a fantastic recreation of it.’ Given Olivier’s ...”

“... his body was burned) in October 1536. Daniell, like his hero, is an altar-stripper: he writes ‘Paul’ and ‘John’ for ‘St Paul’ and ‘St John’ as others write ‘Austen’ for ‘Jane Austen’. (For some reason Tyndale himself kept the ‘St’ for Matthew, but dropped it for everybody else.) He is that rare ...”

“... except his supercilious brazen bounciness. Hrabal’s style (or at least how it comes through Paul Wilson’s translation) is similarly freewheeling, exuberant, torrential, full of food and drink and wild scenes in cafés and athletic sexual encounters. Much of it strikes me as being more like what the Germans think of as uproariously funny than we ...”

“... letters – which have some of the combative quality of his table talk. But he was a difficult man, in whose life protective colouring and character are hard to distinguish. In a notebook he kept in his twenties he wrote: ‘The heart is an instrument which rusts if it is not used. Without a heart can one be an artist?’ Some who knew him were persuaded ...”

“... zone appeared’. The day before, Carlos Maluje Contreras, a member of the Partido Comunista de Chile (PCCh), had been arrested. He was interrogated and tortured through the night. He told his captors that he had arranged a rendezvous with another communist for the following day; if they let him keep it they could make a further arrest. Once alone on the ...”

“... that while its secretary of state, Cardinal Pietro Parolin, and its foreign minister, Archbishop Paul Gallagher, would meet the vice president, they wished to distance themselves from his views. What followed, according to the official Vatican statement, was ‘an exchange of opinions on the international situation, especially regarding countries affected by ...”