“... her from the pictures. As a young woman she was lively-looking and attractive (‘rare beauty’ may be going too far), but her face becomes more strained over time, the expression more set. She and Takhtarev returned to Russia in 1906, and she gave birth to a son, Misha, not long after, when she must have been almost forty. But then the story turns sad: she ...”

“... and ancient and responsible for our most base behaviour, and that childhood nightmares of monsters may be traces of ancestral encounters with dinosaurs. (Like the idea that the heart is the centre of emotion, this seems to me a poetically precise description of a real phenomenon.) The connection of dopamine to addictive behaviour – Cobb cites a Facebook ...”

“... than those of Heinrich von Kleist and Henriette Vogel, who died together on 21 November 1811. ‘May heaven grant you a death even half as joyous and inexpressibly cheerful as mine,’ Kleist wrote to his sister. He was ‘blissfully happy’, he told his cousin, and looking forward to this ‘most splendid and pleasurable of deaths’. Vogel called it ...”

“... archery for men, leaping, vaulting, or any other such harmless recreation, nor from having of May-games, Whitsun-ales, and Morris-dances; and the setting up of May-poles and other sports therewith used: so as the same be had in due and convenient time, without impediment or neglect of divine service.In 1628, colonists ...”

“... for 50p, today, though much leggier than they were and possibly French, they are nearer £10.13 May. On our evening walk we are coming slowly along past the bookshop, me with my stick, when a skateboarder detaches himself from a group of lads and comes for us at high speed. We don’t flinch, though he comes perilously close and fast. R. says, quite ...”

“... dare tamper with the diplomatic correspondence of foreign princes, as ‘the king’s sister, I may claim as much or more respect from them’. When Charles continued to follow his father’s preference for diplomatic negotiations over military deployments, Elizabeth relayed to the archbishop of Canterbury, William Laud, that she had ‘never … read in ...”

“... even ‘magic’, from his comprehensive but terse diaries to make him seem almost human. It may have been royal men who struggled most with life in the dolls’ house. Ridley’s biography of George’s father, Edward VII, showed how as prince of Wales he sank into an analgesic round of gargantuan meals, card playing, shooting and ponderous intercourse ...”

“... me on the night of my sixtieth birthday’ – and three long entries (3 and 4 April and 10 May 1967) typed on thirty or so A5 pages. That spring he was a visiting lecturer at Harpur College in Binghamton, New York, and a jury member in the first round of the International War Crimes Tribunal, convened by Bertrand Russell to examine the US intervention ...”

“... him how to look at painting. Though still in high school, Bois is swept up by the events of May 1968, after which he connects radical art with radical politics whenever he can, an avant-garde commitment that is affirmed when he meets the Brazilian artist Lygia Clark two years later. In 1969, aged seventeen, Bois is offered an opportunity to exhibit his ...”

“... draftees into the Army do not speak Russian, a twelve-fold increase in 20 years. Soviet society may be the most racist in the world, and glasnost has allowed the racism to bubble to the surface. As a Soviet friend told me, ‘when we opened Pandora’s box, we also kicked over some slimy rocks.’ Azeris have slaughtered Armenians, Uzbeks have massacred ...”

“... of the Great War momentarily had this effect not just for one person but a nation. Of course, what may or may not be part of the same phenomenon, it is notorious that, for all the oceans of ink spilt, no one has ever managed to explain what the war was about. A.J.P. Taylor said it happened because the Archduke Franz ...”

“... Rummel, who shocked her by announcing his engagement to somebody else, but they speculate that she may have asked Pound to marry her. On 1 June 1912 she wrote Rummel a farewell letter (‘I am going away for a rest there is no tragedy no ugliness’) and wishing him happiness, and, on the same day, a briefer note to Pound (‘I have reached the height and the ...”

“... of the first movement of what would have been Beethoven’s sixth such concerto), sketch material may even represent a more definitive state of the music than the ‘autograph’: compositional problems that have arisen during the ‘copying-out’ process may be dealt with by a return to the sketchbook. Having usefully ...”

“... given the recent rapid transformations in Poland and the rest of the Soviet imperium, and it may be that Western readers may question the relevance to them of books so outdistanced by political developments. (In 1989 I was aware of an ugly and sub-intellectual wash of resentment against Brecht: ‘with Communism on the ...”

“... mainly plants, without which the modern world as we know it would not be conceivable. You may say that this has nothing to do with culture. But what we cultivate and eat, especially if it is a new kind of foodstuff quite unfamiliar to our way of life, or even an entirely new form of consumption, must influence, and ...”