“... the identification of its owner provides no more than a hypothesis that has to be proved and may be able to be disproved. But the far more common source of hypotheses lies in a murky region far removed from admissible or even reliable evidence – the world of police informers and petty criminals, many of them inadequate or disturbed and all of them ...”

“... A novel may have a coherent plot, passably differentiated characters, fluent dialogue, passages of well-turned prose, and still be worthless if it isn’t also about something that matters. In this respect, the contemporary British novelist has a hard time of it, coming to the form when so much has already been said, when the necessary subjects have already been turned into novels many times over ...”

“... Blanche Patch, who spent her post-war leisure deciphering them. If she mentioned them to Shaw (she may not have), he appears to have shown no interest. Nor has anyone else, much, in the 36 years since Shaw’s death, except the predicted biographers. St John Ervine skimmed their scandalous cream in his ill-tempered centenary life in 1956. Other scholars have ...”

“... friends too often replace intimacy with elaborate, punning jocularity. His famous secretiveness may have been a natural desire to protect the bolt hole Turner the famous painter had in the character of Turner, common-law husband of Sarah Danby and father of two daughters by her, or, later, Turner, alias Booth (sometimes Admiral Booth), common-law husband of ...”

“... concerned. All the same, the magnitude of Elliott’s achievement is not in doubt, whatever one may think of Olivares. The first thing he has done is to bring Don Gaspar back to life. ‘Heavy and squat, with a bulbous nose, black moustachios and a splayed black beard’ – the Count-Duke can thank Velazquez for impressing posterity with his physical ...”

“... and massacres, from the Italian occupation of 1936 to the Red Terror of 1977-78. More people may have been tortured and executed in other Ethiopian prisons, but Alem Bekagn was the emblematic site. On 28 January the African Union will inaugurate its new headquarters. The conference hall, where Africa’s heads of state will meet, is built where the old ...”

“... in something blatantly untrue’, since he identifies it so blatantly, but there may be no other way of getting at whatever truth is lurking here and won’t translate into literality. Such fictions (about the invention of cinema, about all-redeeming moments, about rooms where our deepest wishes are granted) are not only fictions, and can’t ...”

“... the canonical American speech of reconciliation. It has not occurred to him that our time may be more suited to the House Divided speech, in which Lincoln in 1858 showed why the slavery question was so important it might make the two sides irreconcilable. Obama’s many House United speeches, by contrast, are always about unity for its own sake – a ...”

“... king, on whose eyes had been laid crosses in gold foil, was found in Prittlewell in Essex; he may reasonably be identified as King Saeberht of Essex (d. 617), who was the first of his line to convert to Christianity and made possible the institution of St Paul’s Cathedral in London. Metal detecting has also given us the Staffordshire Hoard, discovered ...”

“... unprecedented and wonderful (the Louvre’s is the version copyists soon fastened on), and it may well be that a courtier or emissary had made him a better offer. Some scholars wonder if the Confraternity balked at the picture, considered as an exposition of its great Immaculate theme. It does seem to make more sense – though nothing, in my view, is ...”

“... status’. When we look at some of the words Ogilvie identifies as suffering in this way, we may feel a little sympathetic to Burchfield: was it so strange for him to apply this most discreet of labels to sambal, the name of a Malay condiment, or kuruma, a Japanese word for a rickshaw? Burchfield arrived in Oxford from New Zealand in 1949 and died in ...”

“... are drugs which are structurally similar to chemicals required for normal cellular processes, and may halt cell division or growth. In the summer of 1947 Sidney Farber, a specialist in children’s diseases, diagnosed acute lymphoblastic leukaemia (ALL) in the two-year-old son of a Boston shipyard worker. ALL almost always killed, sometimes within days of ...”

“... ancestors, like present-day bonobos and chimpanzees, to live in co-operative communities.* (This may seem obvious, but many evolutionary theorists insist that displays of altruism among our primate cousins are really just instances of Machiavellian self-interest. Some of these theorists like to argue that the same goes for humans.) However, our ...”

“... DPs to Palestine. Operations were temporarily suspended after Israel’s formal establishment in May 1948 because of the Arab-Israeli conflict, but resumed in 1949, when the IRO paid ‘Joint’ (the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee) and the Jewish Agency for Palestine $10 million to move 120,000 Jewish DPs to Palestine. The total number of ...”

“... Facebook may have started as a way to rank one woman’s hotness over another’s, but it has been quick to produce its first feminists. Everything goes faster in Silicon Valley: code is written overnight; engineers get around the office on aerodynamic skateboards called RipStiks; a company less than ten years old is worth $104 billion for a day before losing $35 billion in value ...”