“... and readers were understood instinctively and by habit to do right by their stomachs: ‘every man in his humour’; ‘you should eat what you are’; ‘chacun à son goût’. Galenic medical theory offered expert explanations of the counsels of proverbial common sense and custom. It was best to eat what was constitutionally similar to you, and when the ...”

“... not money but outstanding feelings. He puts a sheaf of them under his pillow. ‘The doomed man’s brain grew warmer and warmer with a sense of communion’ and he starts to write replies. He lies naked on his cot in the July heat, and his one large hand ‘made joyless love to his body, exploring all of those erogenous zones that the fingers of ...”

“... In the spring​ of 1961, Frantz Fanon wrote to his publisher in Paris to suggest that he ask Jean-Paul Sartre for a preface to his anti-colonial manifesto, The Wretched of the Earth. ‘Tell him that every time I sit down at my desk, I think of him.’ For revolutionary intellectuals in the Third World, Sartre seemed miraculously uncontaminated by the paternalism – and hypocrisy – that gave the white left such a bad reputation ...”

“... in their talk, then explains that ‘you suddenly seem to me to be bathed in blood.’ Paul Eluard, Eisenstein’s guest, stands up during the swanky first night of La Voix Humaine to shout Merde! Merde! Merde! and be mobbed – in cartoon prose – by the dinner-jacketed audience of the Comédie Française (‘short fat little arms have seized ...”

“... the idea that André Bazin, Éric Rohmer and their younger colleagues at Cahiers were watching The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956) in a valedictory spirit was a figment of Sontag’s own nostalgia. (Rohmer, in his essay ‘Redécouvrir l’Amérique’, describes a moment of conversion in the late 1930s.)In interviews, Sontag conceded that there were still great ...”

“... Cade/ Jack Smith, Jack Moon, poor Jack of every trade.’ With the line, ‘One of the Lords of No Man’s Land, good Lob’, we get a topical piece of ambiguity: the poem was written in 1915, when Thomas had already enlisted (he was killed at Arras in 1917). Thomas set out to shape his poetry in ways inevitably, rather than deliberately, English: he made the ...”

“... dozen settings and scores of characters, each treated with impartial sympathy and curiosity. This man is a general, that one a physicist, the next, Eichmann. Grossman was also brave enough to equate the Nazi camps with Stalin’s gulags: a truth-telling for which he and the book were both made to suffer. Life and Fate was completed in 1960, but not published ...”

“... In Dante’s Inferno the serpentine Gerione, a monster with the counterfeit face of a beautiful man and a sting in his scorpion tail, carries Dante and Virgil down to hell on his back. Gustave Doré gave him the wings of a giant bat. Caravaggio borrowed eagle’s wings from Orazio Gentileschi for his figure of Eros: they seem to have been a most covetable ...”

“... great conurbations. Considered as a people-mover, the elevator ranks with those other epochal Fin-de-Siècle inventions, the motor car and the aeroplane. Like them, it combines high speed with a high degree of insulation from the outside world. It’s a vertical bullet train, a space rocket forever stuck in its silo – at least until the moment in Tim ...”

“... On 6 April, Dowd, certain that the hierarchy might listen better if criticism of them came from a man rather than a woman, quoted from her ‘conservative and devout’ brother Kevin’s views on where the Church was going, mentioning that she had learned, ‘shockingly’, that she and her brother ‘agreed on some things’. ‘Vatican II made me ...”

“... involving the whole rigmarole of the Party Conference, they have made any leader impregnable, de facto, until such time as he or she wants to quit. This was hardly the intention in 1981! Together with the ever-increasing speed of ‘events’ – the greatest influence, as Macmillan has told us, on any administration – patronage inoculates governments ...”

“... occupied territory and convincing Egypt and Syria to recognise the ‘Zionist entity’, at least de facto, by negotiating with it through him. Indyk’s account, while adding little to the historical record, makes exciting reading. And despite his veneration for Kissinger, Indyk acknowledges that the elaborate diplomatic manoeuvring was an exercise in damage ...”

“... or Esau’s pottage.’ In 1933, Hourani went up to Oxford, to read PPE: ‘a very thin young man with luminous green eyes and a diaphanous complexion’, according to his friend Charles Issawi. After graduating, he worked for Chatham House and the Foreign Office, before becoming a fellow of Magdalen and subsequently director of the Middle East Centre at ...”

“... Ball himself intoned these nonsensical syllables, he stood before the audience as rigid as the Tin Man, ensheathed in tubes of silver-painted cardboard. The poet Tristan Tzara described Taeuber’s performance in the same piece: a ‘delirious oddity in the spider of the hand vibrates rhythm rapidly rising to the paroxysm of a mocking capriciously beautiful ...”

“... earlier on the first Index Librorum Prohibitorum, issued in the Counter-Reformation pontificate of Paul IV, on the suspect grounds that they had fuelled the corruption of French politics. In the preface to the Six Books of the Commonwealth of 1576, Jean Bodin talks of ‘the delightful principles of Machiavelli, who lays down impiety and injustice as dual ...”