“... weed-killers and pesticides. The left-over straw of cereal crops and other roughage that may cost little or nothing is used, too, but lactating and pregnant cows and those fast-growing steers must also be fed more costly, more protein-rich concentrates, such as maize, oats, barley, grain sorghum, wheat, beet-pulp, oilseed or soya bean ...”

“... he likened to a novel by Balzac. That was the last film Stroheim completed as a director. He may be better known as an actor (‘the man you love to hate’, La Grande Illusion, Sunset Boulevard), but in the history of film he made more of a mark as a director. It was his accumulation of detail that earned Stroheim a place in old film histories as the ...”

“... curvaceous wooden form strung like a harp which we gaze at in dumbfounded silence. These days, it may well be a drystone wall winding between trees before burying its end in a lake, like the great Norse serpent for ever drinking the world’s waters dry. Or a cairn on a Highland headland with a fire flaming inside it. Or a longboat made of stakes and stones ...”

“... the continent is to be saved it can only be with intervention from outside. And that intervention may have to be so comprehensive that it amounts to little less than informal recolonisation. This throws a strange new light on the decolonisation process which Africa went through – and which, in most cases, must now be judged a failure. It ...”

“... Her researches were deeply implicated in Modernist recoveries of the classics; and though it may be that they were substantially misread and misunderstood in the process, their richness and suggestiveness lent themselves to such creative (mis)appropriation (as the work of Mary Douglas did during the 1960s). And after the Second World War, when ...”

“... looked as if they had been made from blankets), new clothes gave him a heart-pumping thrill. He may have been hard up, but he wanted several cashmere sweaters, a dark blue jacket and a pair of saddle shoes. Late one night he broke into a dry-cleaner’s and took everything that fitted. It was dark in the shop and the booty was disappointing, for the most ...”

“... pregnant opening – ‘12 June. I’ve never known such a summer. A sultry heatwave since mid-May. All day a thick cloud of dust hangs unmoving over streets and market-places’ – reminds me irresistibly of another great beginning: ‘Ganz Europa leidet gegenwärtig unter dieser Hitze’ (‘All Europe is currently suffering in this heatwave’), from ...”

“... time, the government published its 2006-7 budget on the Finance Ministry website. And then in May, the government – again a first – announced how much had been received or pledged by oil companies bidding for offshore contracts. ExxonMobil is the leading producer in Angola, pumping 560,000 barrels per day. Chevron is second with 420,000 barrels and ...”

“... of a binational state in which Palestinians would be the majority. The Middle East peace process may well be the most spectacular deception in modern diplomatic history. Since the failed Camp David summit of 2000, and actually well before it, Israel’s interest in a peace process – other than for the purpose of obtaining Palestinian and international ...”

“... a Mutual Suicide Association, by the regulations whereof any member being weary of life, may call at any time upon another to cut his throat for him. It is all of course to be done very quietly without weeping or gnashing of teeth. I, for instance, am to go in and say, ‘I say, Hunt, just stop painting that head a minute, and cut my throat’; to ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... wants to say now, and because one believes there is no other way of getting a hearing. Pamphlets may turn on points of ethics or theology, but they always have a clear political implication.’ For historians, this immediacy is the problem, with the added challenge that for the years between 1570 and 1600 pamphlets came not just singly or in short exchanges ...”

“... from whose etceteras no traveller ever whatnotted, and your particular crimes are remembered. This may well be the reason why writing that gets inside death (Hamlet, the Iliad) has on the whole mattered more to people than writing about life or parties. Death tells us more about what we are: a universal nothing but also very painfully a particular ...”

“... appalling conditions of travel, bug-ridden hotels and half-sold halls. In a single year, from May 1840, he made no fewer than four visits to the British Isles, and for the second and third of them was offered the enormous fee of 37,000 francs to play more than eighty concerts, over a distance (Hilmes reckons) of some 3500 miles, taking in the north of ...”