“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of ‘Dutch Graves in Bucks County’, a poem that Wallace Stevens published in 1943. The image may have come from a march-of-time documentary of Americans training to fight in the Second World War. Probably the machines included tanks and a lorry convoy, possibly a squadron of fighter planes. What became of the angry men when the war was over? I grew up in ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... about the play’s opening stage direction, ‘The Scene India’, and its hint that Fletcher may have been fascinated not by Islam so much as a highly theatricalised notion of India. For early modern Europeans, India was less a nation or even a vast swathe of territory than an idea. It was a cornucopia of riches – ‘th’Indias of spice and ...”

“... that there was enough evidence to prove her a witch several times over. A hearing took place in May 1618, and a commission was set up later that summer. But the wheels of justice turned slowly. Proceedings began in Leonberg town hall on 9 November 1619. Reinbold’s kinsmen repeated their suspicions, further alleging that Katharina had driven her husband ...”

“... seems mere stylistic dither and does not touch her essential seriousness. Though her reader may flip ahead, may put down the book and forget where she left off, may allow herself to stray from attention, for Dillard herself the particulars of the world require witness. As a ...”

“... she muses later. ‘It is a subject that insensibly forces itself upon my notice.’ All this may have been a nod to the Gothic tastes of a British readership, but it also echoed a widely-held perception of Bengal as a disease-ridden place where death struck quickly and too soon. The other danger that Sophia skirts lies in an equally common fate for ...”

“... himself for weeks in the Martí library in Cuba, but readers who know nothing but this novel may wonder whether the secular saint is worthy of reverence. He can be a little buffoonish, a flirtatious sensualist making pronouncements on love (‘Love is a wild beast that needs to be fed anew every day’), always ready to wow the señoritas with a new line ...”

“... which Gerrard herself provided in her previous book, The Patriot Opposition to Walpole (1994). I may be a cynic, but the passages of Aaron Hill: The Muses’ Projector that most appeal to me are those showing that Hill was not all go-getterish self-confidence, brazen Bransonism; that a streak of self-doubt was also part of his make-up; that he was prone to ...”

“... the establishment of some higher ethical concept.’ Consciousness of his honourable calling may induce the poet to present himself as at once dignified and eccentric – epithets which catch some aspects of Empson as a social presence. Part of his eccentricity must be an interest, unshared by most literary people, in the greatest imaginative ...”

“... that some of the first and fiercest episodes in the Indian Mutiny played themselves out. On 11 May, rebelling sepoys of the Bengal Army crossed the River Jumna and called on the Mughal emperor Bahadur Shah to serve as their protector. Next, they turned their attention to the British civilians who clustered in the area around the church, slaughtering the ...”

“... If she appeared to the Tory faithful as a painfully nostalgic evocation of the glory days, this may remind us that the average age of party members is currently 67. If she inspired Labour to suggest that an otherwise dull election was fraught with unsuspected ideological peril by showing us, on the hoardings, that the bald fact of Hague’s leadership ...”