“... political activists and people old enough to remember the days of the Belgian Congo, including a man who claimed (plausibly) to be 126 years old. Congo, Van Reybrouck insists, is more than the ‘world’s storehouse’: it has ‘played a crucially important role in the tentative definition of an international world order’. In the process the Congolese ...”

“... set up a makeshift classroom under a tree. In 1968, she won a place at the Lycée Notre-Dame de Cîteaux, an elite secondary school for girls in Kigali. She felt she was finally on her way to a place where intelligence mattered more than ethnicity. But ethnic quotas, which stipulated that only 10 per cent of students could be Tutsi, ensured that she was ...”

“... herself, is prefaced by four lines from Hughes’s poem ‘Cross’, published in 1925:My old man died in a fine big house.My ma died in a shack.I wonder where I’m gonna die,Being neither white nor black?Both Larsen and Hughes confronted and dramatised the trope of the ‘tragic mulatto’: Larsen in novels about the upper echelons of Harlem high ...”

“... words were lethal weapons. The Bible didn’t offer much justification for laughter. Saint Paul, for instance, told the Ephesians not to indulge in ‘foolish talking or jesting’. Only the example of Elijah, who taunted the false prophets of Baal, seems to show that, as the 17th-century theologian Isaac Barrow wrote, ‘facetious wit’ was sometimes ...”

“... Black Country MP John Stonehouse, soon to become postmaster general and then regarded as a coming man in the Labour Party, perhaps even a future leader. Stonehouse had denounced as ‘a canker’ the campaign by local Sikh bus conductors to be allowed to wear their turbans at work. By then, most British bus companies had already agreed to drop the ban on ...”

“... In 1954, I was a pupil at Les Dames de Marie, a French-speaking convent school in an expansive and pastoral suburb of Brussels. Every morning, as we crocodile-filed into our classrooms, we sang patriotic hymns. One of these, the ‘Marche Lorraine’, has a rousing chorus; in rapid ascending arpeggios as in a trumpet voluntary, we blasted out a paean to ‘the young shepherdess in clogs and woollen skirt’ who took up arms and walked out fearlessly to confront her king and restore him to his throne ...”

“... and self-dramatising misery breaks through – ‘The image he projected of an isolated, depressed man is almost comically contradicted by his diary.’ She writes less persuasively about the poetry, though it has to be said that Thomas’s poetry is unusually difficult to write about, partly because he writes in such ordinary language, with unusual tact and ...”

“... his famous wooziness about names – he has been known to refer to Liam Brady as ‘Ian’, to Paul McGrath as ‘John’, and during the World Cup described Egypt’s best players as ‘the boy with the beard, the dark lad who played in midfield, the sweeper, the goalkeeper, the little dark lad who played in midfield and the very coloured ...”

“... painted, cooked, travelled and made love in something like contentment. She was at the Slade with Paul Nash (who gave her his braces, taking them off on top of a bus), and through him or through Nevinson she might have become an illustrator, as they were, for the Poetry Bookshop. She could have learned etching from Sickert, always generous to beginners, or ...”

“... Kamen’s point of departure is Braudel’s description of the Empire of Philip II as ‘un total de faiblesse’ – is also widely accepted. True, few recent historians of Spain have seen things this way, but neither are they as resolutely nationalistic as Kamen makes out. Most of the works he cites in support of his belief that Spanish historiography is ...”

“... essays become the headnotes to Franzen’s angst. Interspersed are glosses by the American scholar Paul Reitter, who has the thankless job of historically contextualising Kraus’s grievances, and the German-Austrian writer Daniel Kehlmann, whose interpretations can be divided into the four categories that Freud apportioned for jokes: the obscene, the ...”

“... He reproduces a deliciously modish Bond Street tailor’s advertisement depicting ‘The Man of Today’: an infantry officer in superbly-cut uniform, stationed between the pile of his discarded top hat, white waistcoat and silver-topped cane and a mighty shell-burst labelled ‘WAR’. Again, one of the mushroom-growths of the war was ...”

“... of what he finds, though he struggles to keep his cool when unpicking the arcana of the Prieuré de Sion, which proposes that the Holy Grail is Mary Magdalene’s womb, and that her child with Jesus connects the kings of France to the Royal House of David.Mary Magdalene appears by name in the gospels as a woman possessed by seven devils, which are driven out ...”

“... Secretary of State for Northern Ireland terms ‘the Irish fever, the worst variety known to man’. As a critic, Levi is pure waffle, a recycled Maurice Bowra. I look forward to his next lecture. Levi’s poetry may not be the worst variety known to man, if only because it is easy to avoid being infected by it. In one ...”

“... Kingsley Amis called Dylan Thomas’s life, the life told by Thomas’s first thorough biographer Paul Ferris, ‘a hilarious, shocking, sad story’. Thomas was very important to the Amis-Larkin club partly because he seemed determined not to be seen to be taking anything, including himself, too seriously. In 1941, Larkin refers to Thomas coming to the English Club at Oxford: ‘Hell of a fine man: little, snubby, hopelessly pissed bloke who made hundreds of cracks and read parodies of everybody in appropriate voices ...”