“... the Company created a sizeable territorial state, first in eastern and southern India, then in the north and west. The morality of what was being done was under challenge, however. Indian rulers and other elites often directed sarcastic barbs at Company Bahadur (or the Honourable Company), that rapacious warlord masquerading as a merchant. In Britain, the ...”

“... is to be turned back, as if after a long absence, into a human being.’ So wrote Nicole Krauss. Paul Auster ranked the book with Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina: ‘wrenching, beautiful, unforgettable’. Grossman’s American publisher called it ‘one of the very greatest novels I shall have the privilege of publishing … When critics look back at the ...”

“... you read over the work it’s clear that St Lucia was always a presence even when Walcott was in North America and Europe. He came home when he reached his eighties, and he’s unlikely to leave again except on short trips (the Globe will stage Omeros next month and maybe he’ll get to London). It’s odd, in a world fizzing with insects and furious ...”

“... new marble monument ‘to the victims of terrorism, 1968-2007’ in Plaza Angel González, in the north-west of the city. The victims of ETA and Islamic extremism can be remembered, but not the victims of the Spanish government. Nearby, some anti-fascist graffiti had been daubed over with the legend ‘Crew 38’, a neo-Nazi sign in yellow and red, alongside ...”

“... doubt because the combination of glass façades and inadequate underfloor heating meant that the north side of the building froze while the south was like a hothouse. A difference in temperature of as much as 30ºC from one side to the other not only made it unpleasant to inhabit, it had the effect, as Pevsner pointed out, of warping the structural metal ...”

“... half-Jewish background and made her only foray into political journalism in order to rebuke Pope Paul VI for being tactless to Golda Meir. ‘All the more since I discovered myself to be a Catholic animal,’ she wrote in 1963, ‘am I a Gentile Jewess.’ When Spark was starting out, in the late 1940s, she was determined to avoid the ‘slop and ...”

“... Each had a unique character. Still, there was a pattern of increasing violence. Zhytomyr, in north-west Ukraine, saw two pogroms in the space of two months; the town had sustained a brief period of Bolshevik occupation, and local opinion identified Jews – sometimes correctly – with the brutality of the Cheka. But the inhabitants of Zhytomyr conflated ...”

“... story of his singularity was repeated so often that in 2014 his biographers Martin Lee-Browne and Paul Guinery could still claim that ‘Delius would spend his life composing music that bore no relationship to anything, good or bad, that had been written before.’Delius has been perceived this way in part because he wrote music that was not easily associated ...”

“... broader American minds, and getting himself posted to the Eisenhower-Macmillan joint command in North Africa. He also developed, according to Howard, a marked preference for the active-service officer over ‘the trained diplomats or elected politicians with whom he had been accustomed to deal in London’. After the war, though sharing much of the general ...”

“... Ellis, a Roman Catholic novelist, was brought up in Penmaenmawr, between Conwy and Bangor on the North Wales coast, facing the island of Anglesey. In one of her moods, she is inclined towards elegy for the ruined stone cottages and commination for all ‘housing developments’. She requires some great authority to forbid change in her childhood ...”

“... credit to him for doing so, so soon after such a terrible moment in his career – he brought Paul Gascoigne along with him. This three-way exchange is a scoop for Davies, not least because of Gascoigne’s otherwise intractable hostility to the press: a few months before, Davies had interviewed Chris Waddle while Gascoigne sat beside them, throwing ...”

“... Historicism and Cultural Materialism are enterprises which, as products of our Western European or North American presuppositions, prove to be as blindly culture-specific as the societies they describe.’ He is rightly cheerful about this prospect of his own occultation; it is a fate which, like death, he will share with us all. But he hopes that, unlike most ...”

“... of his intense negotiations with Russia and China in the early Seventies – the isolation of North Vietnam – failed to work out, when Hanoi reunited the country by force of arms in 1975. In Europe, his interventions were misguided: he remained long suspicious of the Ostpolitik of Brandt and failed to see how the situation on the continent was ...”

“... sociologists have had reason to ask. On the one hand are those, including the whole of mainstream North American sociology, who go on about their research – using statistics and causal talk, scientificating by validation and the accumulation of findings – who seldom notice that they have been castigated as positivists, and who remember Durkheim as someone ...”

“... work on Northern Ireland. It is certainly not lacking in nerve: MacDonald is ready to assert that Paul Bew, the most challenging of modern Ulster-bred historians, ‘cannot appreciate – still less explain – the genuine perversity of Northern Ireland’. But the most serious weakness of this book lies in its failure to engage with its own subtitle. Even if ...”