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“... moment in the Inferno when Paolo and Francesca share ‘a kiss both looked-for and unbidden’ (in Paul Batchelor’s translation) as they read. That’s another thing: Smith’s literariness comes through here as something more amusing; fragments with titles such as ‘Speak, radio’ and ‘Brideshead unvisited’ open up the story to give a parallel ...”

“... defined groups: administrators, academics and fee-paying students. The origins of this arrangement lay in 19th-century Berlin, and Humboldt University, founded in 1810 in the aftermath of Napoleon’s conquest of Prussia. The African university makes its appearance later in the 19th century. At the southern end of the continent, colleges were started from ...”

“... towards the young Jewish state, but made its reservations plain. In an article published in 1958, Paul Ricoeur challenged the claims of André Neher, a fellow contributor to L’Esprit, that the accession of Jews to biblical lands anchored an ‘essence’ of Jewishness. ‘Is this essence you invoke,’ Ricoeur asked Neher, ‘which in your view founds your ...”

“... handsome, as became clear in the arguments fifty years ago about how much grime to wash off St Paul’s. The contrast on a bright day between the dirty-grey south portico of St George’s, which was cleaned decades ago, and the stark black and white of the untouched south face of the tower suggests that the clear picture one now has of the portico’s ...”

“... troops he commanded from beating the Russians to Berlin, though he cannot help noting that Berlin lay deep inside what had been agreed as the Soviet zone of occupation. Charles Whiting claims melodramatically that Karl Timmerman, the US officer who captured that famous bridge over the Rhine at Remagen which the Germans had failed to blow up, settled our ...”

“... buried beneath an excess of facts. It’s the first reflex of the con man, the bullshitter, to lay down a smokescreen of names, dates, addresses. Bore the interrogator into submission. Given all that weight of evidence, frequently offered in the language of a statement to the police (‘Moreover ...’), imaginative revisions of the fabulist tendency will ...”

“... and seemed oblivious of the rain … He continued his sightless walk, sloshing through pools that lay here and there on the grass, then crunching his way over the gravel in the direction of the clump of lavender planted by his wife ‘before she died’. At the lavender he froze into an attitude of despair. A little later Rover struggled up and under the ...”

“... out with the hermeneutic bathwater was disabused. Philistinism or superiority, for her, lay in the quality of mind manifested in one’s sensuous reaction. If you couldn’t think – think well, think quickly, think like Sontag – then you didn’t feel. One comes with mixed feelings to the personal journals that Sontag kept diligently but did not ...”

“... like Brandt, were German. The spread of TB was one of the legacies of the First World War. As Paul Delany tells us, in Germany TB sufferers doubled in number in the last two years of the war, when ‘soap disappeared completely, and the streetcars were foul with the distinctive stench of famine.’ Rolf Brandt, Willy’s younger brother,would later talk ...”

“... By creating an ‘emerging market’ from a decrepit state-owned petroleum industry, the war would lay the foundations for something dear to the hearts of the Washington cabal: an end to (other people’s) economic nationalism and producer cartels. In this ideological universe, oil figured centrally, since oil had remained one of the Third World’s most ...”

“... on their own deadlines to discuss their common quarry with him. All this activity may puzzle the lay person. Holden’s final pages report Olivier alive, as well as can be expected at 81, residing tranquilly in the Sussex countryside, still swimming occasional lengths of his pool in the altogether and attending the first nights of the three children who have ...”

“... obviously forthcoming you would nevertheless feel that the possibility of a thorough explanation lay somewhere within the comprehensive world of its realism. The subject of every canvas by Constable, you could say, is the commonplace and the deep emotional satisfactions of the ordinary: ‘My limited and abstracted art is to be found under every hedge,’ he ...”

“... to fashion, a tradition Brogue editors have, for the most part, happily upheld. Her tendencies lay avant-gardewards; sufficiently so that Nast got jittery and shipped her off to New York to learn publishing his way before she’d even begun (his approach was: know your audience). British Vogue’s official history begins not with Todd, or her temporary ...”

“... Manhattan’s Café Bizarre, when an already enormously famous Andy Warhol (and his canny manager, Paul Morrissey) arrived to offer them a deal. Warhol was in need of music. He, or Morrissey, seems to have known of the group through the overlap between the underground film world and the avant-garde musicians who worked as accompanists. Warhol put them on a ...”

“... who can’t see beyond the Georgians, as when he recommends to those unable to read Sanskrit Paul Deussen’s 1897 translation into German of Brihadaranyaka-Upanishad, where the ‘fable of the meaning of the Thunder’ can be found. His note, on the other hand, on Tiresias (the blind ancient Greek prophet who had been both man and woman) suggested a way ...”