“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... War, the asylums of North Africa, clandestine anti-colonial work. Fanon was born in 1925 in Fort-de-France, the capital of Martinique, the fifth of eight children. His father, Félix, a customs inspector, was a descendant of free black cocoa farmers. His mother, Eléanoro, a shopkeeper, was the illegitimate daughter of a mixed-race couple, and appears to ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... I have delayed and fussed, despaired and dithered, and rewritten the first half several times. Paul Strohm, to whom I went for advice early on, has written and published his own in the interim.1 But perhaps at last the mist is clearing. How does one write a literary biography of a figure from the long past? My slowness has been fostered by a jumble of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... images, were prepared by Dada. And Breton did start out, along with fellow poets Louis Aragon and Paul Éluard, in the Dadaist camp, won over by its charismatic leaders, Tristan Tzara and Francis Picabia, who had converged on Paris as soon as possible after the First World War. Despite the internationalism of the moment, Breton gave the Surrealist movement a ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Apollinaire. But the poem is also part of a Caribbean lineage that goes back to the Haitian Baron de Vastey, whose book The Colonial System Unveiled (1814) is sometimes described as the first work of anticolonial theory, and the Trinidadian linguist John Jacob Thomas, whose polemic Froudacity was published in 1889. Vastey and Thomas analysed the racist ...”

“... surrounded by boys with what I still think of as normal classic names: Simon, Mark, Peter, Andrew, Paul, Martin, Michael, Stephen, Richard, Robert, David. Girls’ names remained more modish: some Sarahs, Anns and Elizabeths and even some residual Marys, but also plenty of Janets, Jackies, Lisas and Debbies, who soared and plummeted through the bestseller ...”

“... descends smilingly to the ground, only to tumble back into the lascivious arms of another man. Altogether an appropriately ambivalent emblem, one might think, for the vicissitudes that James Boswell would experience throughout his life, and the turbulence of his reputation since his death. It was not just a case of the ...”