“... arsehole’ to one of his meaner conquests), the prototype of the selfish and self-assured young man, who when the book begins has just caught a glimpse of his intended next victim, Hannah, the stately and beautiful wife of the camp commandant. He, the commandant, ‘the Old Boozer’ Major Paul Doll is the second ...”

“... in careful detail, what he saw around him: a body being loaded onto a cart full of corpses; a man on the run from a militiaman with a rifle; a prisoner being dragged to his death; skeletal figures in rags carrying logs or rocks while, in the distance, men are being beaten; a long, grim queue for soup.Arikha had accumulated thirty sketches when he was ...”

“... facts have parted company but that opinion takes precedence. The first scene: I’m walking beside Paul Kagame, the current president of Rwanda and then a rebel leader, past low picket fences and small prefabricated houses in a residential suburb of Brussels. It’s cold and our breath mingles in the air as we speak. Kagame is swaddled in a thick coat. Even ...”

“... world stands with them in order to diminish their unhappiness, and there are those at the Collège de France who labour under no such necessity. This cult of the negative is no doubt as much the legacy of Mallarmé as it is of the death camps. Saussure’s celebrated claim that there is nothing positive in language was made long before the Holocaust. The ...”

“... are fatally compromised by their taking place in a zone which, linguistically, is already no man’s land. The result is that Landolfi’s flaky humour is reduced to mere facetiousness, his parody to imitation, and his complex sadomasochistic role-play to a gratuitous sexist nastiness. The earlier stories, which have more substance, fare somewhat better ...”

“... revolution. The French Revolution unleashed a reactionary critique of secret societies. Augustin de Barruel’s widely translated Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire du jacobinisme (1797) traced a triad of conspiracies – of philosophes, Freemasons and Illuminati – which lay behind the assault on the Ancien Régime. English Masonry, however, unlike the ...”

“... politicians appreciated these nuances, though some officials, including Michael Oatley, the MI6 man on the ground, certainly did. The principal IRA objective was an invitingly lowish hurdle, and should have been seen as such: ‘an acknowledgment of the right of the Irish people to determine their own future without interference from the British ...”

“... savant, bearded and unkempt, who stares out at the camera with weary, if aggressive, confidence. Paul Strathern starts his history of chemistry, Mendeleev’s Dream, with a description of one such photograph, seeing in this ‘genius professor’ the modern successor of ‘a Siberian shaman’, a ‘new kind of messiah’. Peter Atkins, a university chemist ...”

“... about things’. The end leaves no room for doubt, for the book actually splits into two voices, a man’s and a young woman’s. The conversation between them finally comes to rest on the question of oracles as forums for talking about hopes and fears – not banishing them, but ‘getting along with them’. Even this is not quite a conclusion: ‘So what ...”

“... children today. It is also the culmination of Peter Brook’s 15-year-old Centre International de Créations Théâtrales. Brook and Carrière have adapted The Mahabharata into three plays: The Game of Dice, The Exile in the Forest and The War. The titles describe the key scenes and actions in the combat between two related clans which forms the heart of ...”

“... impending departure into the events of the previous year. Michael is an unprepossessing family man. He takes what he likes and abuses the rest, which is sometimes his wife. When her pregnancy entered its advanced stages, she became useless, no longer pleasurable, and he left her for the consolations of his mistress. Nevertheless, for all his ...”

“... history’ but ‘refuses to recognise it as a creative or culpable force’: Their vision of man in the New World is Adamic. In their exuberance he is still capable of enormous wonder. Yet he has paid his accounts to Greece and Rome and walks in a world without monuments and ruins. They exhort him against the fearful magnet of older civilisations ...”

“... sort. In northern Europe, social democrats have been losing to conservatives. In Britain, as Paul Whiteley recalls, the Labour Party has been shedding an average of eleven thousand members a year since the early Fifties. Its share of the vote in 1983, a little more than a quarter, was the lowest at any general election since 1918. Surveys suggest that it ...”

“... Vatican. Dubbed ‘Cosea’, the committee would have eight members, one of whom, Jean-Baptiste de Franssu (52, French), is now president of IOR, the Vatican bank, while another, Monsignor Lucio Balda (55, Spanish), is in a prison cell charged with leaking the documents that form the basis for the two books under review. Cosea lasted ten months, fighting an ...”

“... late Jon-Pál Sigmarsson, the virtually albino Icelandic winner of the ‘World’s Strongest Man’ competition, who used to beat his chest, turn engagingly puce, and roar ‘I am a Viking’ before destroying Geoff Capes, Grizzly Brown and all comers at the who-can-turn-over-most-cars-in-sixty-seconds contest. It may be only at the level of Raquel ...”