“... but more offensive than the English translation suggests).When Mussolini went to Palermo in May 1924 he met with more open disrespect. On arriving at the small town of Piana dei Greci (now Piana degli Albanesi) with a large entourage, he was met by the local mafia boss, Francesco Cuccia, who had become mayor by defeating the Socialists not at the ballot ...”

“... Angela Olive Stalker​ was born to a London mother and Scottish father in Eastbourne in May 1940 and raised in Balham in South London. She married Paul Carter in 1960 when she was just twenty, then moved with her husband to Bristol, where she wrote four novels in quick succession and started publishing her journalism in New Society magazine. Her ...”

“... where they         have to go.’ ‘O glory of every poet, have a light, May my Zippo benefit me now, And all my stripping of your Sonnets. You see this hairy she-rat                   that stalks me like a pimp: Get her      off my back,                   for every vein and pulse ...”

“... and to find narrative forms that suited his slippery subject. The point is that the slackness may be as important as the precision; and that there are whole reaches of the novels that are neither slack nor precise but something else. Durrell wrote a lot before and after the Quartet: poems, plays, a book about Cyprus, other novels. T.S. Eliot greatly ...”

“... of crop marks in revealing the extent of Roman settlement: ‘When the corne is come uppe a man may see the draughts of streetes crossing one another: (for, wheresoever the streetes went, there the corne is thinne).’ For Camden, the Romans were irreducibly part of British history, just as their traces were indelibly written on its terrain. Most ...”

“... the ambivalent political and military successes of Marcus himself, and a devastating plague, which may on McLynn’s generous estimates have wiped out up to 18 million people across the Roman world, including the emperor himself (despite the Gladiator version of his death). He was in other words a decent, thoughtful man ‘caught up in the whirlwind of ...”

“... But then the surprise lasts only as long as we are not thinking very hard. Monuments may or may not endure, but they are not looked at very closely; and fragile-seeming gestures, songs, jokes, metaphors, teasing sentences, often have long lives in the intimacy of many minds. It’s easy, and usually rash, to ...”

“... wealth from the haves to the have-nots. Four-fifths of Germans paid no direct war taxes up until 8 May 1945, and indirect taxation was modest: duties on tobacco, brandy and beer (this last tax was lower in the beer-loving south), but never on wine. Tax burdens fell on the well-to-do. As the title of the German edition of this book has it, this was a ...”

“... This is a period without glamour,’ Isherwood writes in a diary entry for 18 May 1962, apropos his lover Don Bachardy’s birthday. ‘He blames me because his birthday isn’t marvellous, and I would blame him under the same circumstances.’ Isherwood feared these times without glamour – if they were without glamour – because he was about to be in his sixties and on this particular day Bachardy had turned 28 ...”

“... interviews with Barthes, Lévi-Strauss and Boulez. More radical changes followed in the wake of May 1968. In October 1969, Jean-Louis Comolli and Jean Narboni issued a manifesto for Cahiers’ new role, outlining a division of films into seven types, all differently inflected by ideology (from lucid critique to blind complicity), and proposing that ...”

“... much besides. Among other grisly discoveries noted are the finds at Repton in Derbyshire, which may have included – the site has been repeatedly disturbed since it was first discovered in 1686 – a tall skeleton in a stone sarcophagus, and a stack of bones from 264 individuals, most of them unusually tall and robust males. Battle-dead? Massacre? Monkish ...”

“... stand in the way of what he saw as the truth. The furore surrounding Newman’s conversion to Rome may seem strange today. But the theologian was one of the most distinguished minds in Oxford; Oxford was a bastion of Anglican doctrine, defending and preserving it rather as the Vatican did with Catholic dogma; and Anglicanism played a vital role in the ...”

“... the ICC’s move poses a real threat to the unstable peace in the south and west of Sudan, and may well increase the chances of state violence against civilians and aid workers. Who then will pay the price for the ICC’s pretensions to global relevance? The trouble with human rights as an ideology, in Zolo’s view, is its failure to address collective ...”

“... possibility’ that his father wasn’t the humdrum Jonathan, and that his grudging paternal uncle may have known it. Much else in the early life turns out to be ‘just possible’, ‘not impossible’ or ‘far-fetched … but worth considering’, not least when Swift leaves Trinity College Dublin and moves to England in the 1680s as private secretary ...”

“... at the dark brown sandstone of the Renfrew Street front, really made of the building. Glasgow may be on the pilgrimage route along with Barcelona, Budapest, Nancy, Moscow and Riga, those cities in which strikingly original buildings from the years around 1900 can be found, whether Art Nouveau, Jugendstil or Modernismo, but the GSA building is not wildly ...”