“... tends to turn up at precisely those moments when we least expect it. Indeed, that we may be most archly self-conscious when we are apparently most forgetful of ourselves. It was his fear that self-consciousness went all the way down – that unselfconsciousness is something we enact, like everything else – that drew Isherwood to Eastern ...”

“... as part of the strategy to help the Afghan people oppressed by the Taliban; as Tony Blair said, we may have to bomb the Taliban in order to secure food transportation and distribution. Perhaps the ultimate image of the ‘local population’ as homo sacer is that of the American war plane flying above Afghanistan: one can never be sure whether it will be ...”

“... of ending the Arab slave trade. Third, if they might not have been strictly justified, they may nonetheless have been excusable, usually because of Stanley’s sufferings, either on his expeditions (the fevers and so on) or because of his background. The ordeals of African exploration at this time were frightful – you were lucky if you returned with ...”

“... who was UN deputy force commander in Rwanda at the time of the genocide. I met him in Khartoum in May this year, and asked what he thought of AMIS. ‘I got to Darfur in January 2005,’ he said. ‘I found out they were doing an incredibly good job. First, the rebel movements were still intact, so it was easy to deal with the government and the two rebel ...”

“... achievements of our Soviet Union. Fourteen-year-old Nina Lugovskaya wrote this in her diary on 2 May 1933 (Gennady was a classmate). Four years later, the secret police confiscated the diary and arrested its author. When the NKVD men read it, they underlined this passage, along with other heterodox thoughts. Against the new society! Contemptuous of Soviet ...”

“... do not greatly concern Davies. In his account, the uprising transcends what individual Poles may have willed. Warsaw here is one of several European capitals watching the battle front move rapidly in their direction. Like Paris or Prague, it was a ‘dangerous place’ where ‘something could erupt at any moment . . . Once someone caught sight of the ...”

“... to Bathe Your New Baby’ v. ‘Win the Chance to Pole-Dance with Pamela!’ – it may be time to consider whether these men’s magazines aren’t just the latest enlargement on the old fantasy of men having everything they want to have and finding a way to call it their destiny. Stag & Groom Magazine is edited by a woman who has no end of ...”

“... since a small selection was included in the prose collection In the Green Tree (1948): ‘It may be,’ Walter Allen wrote in the New Statesman, ‘that these letters will ultimately take a higher place than either the poetry or the stories for, like Keats’s, they point to a maturity beyond anything their author had been able to express in his ...”

“... so on. The heart was missing, however: ‘the pericardium was open below & the heart absent.’ It may have been burned in the fireplace, which bore evidence of a ‘fire so large as to melt the spout off the kettle’. More probably it was taken away by the killer. This is another of Jack’s signatures: what is known in the lexicons of Ripperology as the ...”

“... The real reason Munthe left Paris at the end of 1887, Jangfeldt says, was his divorce. This may come as a surprise to readers of The Story of San Michele, who aren’t given any reason to suppose he was ever married. Ultima Hornberg, like Munthe the child of a Swedish chemist, was a 19-year-old art student when she met Munthe in Paris in the summer of ...”

“... argue – The Everlasting Man is more conciliatory, and more elementary. Chesterton thinks he may have taken his imitation of innocence too far, exaggerating ‘even my own ignorance’ in the process. In the earlier book he just fills the world with straw men and waits for them to fall down. If the intellectual world of his day is a madhouse, as he ...”

“... real luxuries, offered only to a select and well-paid few, were priced absurdly low.) Prokofiev may later have regretted this decision: good apartments were in very short supply in Moscow, and he never got one he really liked. Now came the challenge of becoming a Soviet composer. Apolitical as he was, Prokofiev nevertheless seems genuinely to have welcomed ...”

“... who is capable of leaving a page blank. ‘His readiness to become involved in slave management may have been a sign of personal desperation; it is still shocking, and contradicts the ideology implicit and explicit in much of his poetry.’ Crawford’s book sets out to assemble what he calls ‘a credible portrait’, not a character reconstructed like one ...”

“... knowingly archival Victorianism (she has used the phrase ‘self-conscious realism’). This may involve not only telling characters what they don’t know, but how they don’t think. A little later in The Children’s Book, Philip Warren is walking on Romney Marsh, towards his favourite church, St Thomas Becket. He ‘knew little about Thomas ...”

“... so that we can learn lessons’.* It offers a long and painful account of an episode that may come to be seen as marking the moment when the UK fell off its global perch, trust in government collapsed and the country turned inward and began to disintegrate. When the report was published I was outside the Queen Elizabeth II Centre in the shadow of ...”