“... It may seem perverse to begin an essay on India by invoking a historian of France: Eugen Weber, who died this year, a colleague of mine and a formidable presence at UCLA. He wrote a book in 1976 on how France became a proper nation by transforming ‘peasants into Frenchmen’. But the Weber I knew, and bantered with during the last years of his life, also had an Indian past of which he felt periodically obliged to speak, though he spoke of it to me with discomfort ...”

“... are willing to take an interdisciplinary approach, and realise that what is under investigation may not fit existing paradigms. They apply Occam’s razor, and try to test claims using existing methodology. They put the burden of proof on the claimant. A third category, ‘mystery-mongers’, are ‘fundamentally unscientific’. They don’t really want ...”

“... the emergence of leftist presidents at the head of indigenous movements in Bolivia and Ecuador, may yet produce a surprise result in Paraguay’s elections. Fernando Lugo, a 58-year-old former bishop, emerged two years ago as the unexpected candidate of the freshly minted left-wing opposition, and has been leading in the opinion polls ever since. With a ...”

“... and treat the army as it deserved to be treated. Sympathetic commanders were canvassed. On 15 May 218, Heliogabalus, Maesa, Soaemias and the boy’s tutor left Emesa under cover of darkness for the camp of the Legio III Gallica at Raphaneae. Their reception there was not guaranteed, but they were hopeful. The legion, despite its name, had been quartered ...”

“... of flintlock at dawn, but it is still associated with a certain glamour. The high-living image may hold true for some American ambassadors, many of whom are big donors and political appointees, but it’s not a realistic picture for most diplomats. In fact, diplomats are often quite isolated from the societies to which they are posted. Their central task ...”

“... their ancestors’ ‘heroic struggle’ for ‘individual freedom’. Observers outside Tennessee may find it incongruous to identify a war fought to preserve slavery with the ideal of freedom, but Jefferson Cowie, who teaches history at Vanderbilt University, in the heart of the state, wouldn’t be surprised. His new book seeks to explain why so many ...”

“... These images, which astonished the Surrealists-to-be when they were first shown in Paris in May 1921, provided the basic template for the Surrealist picture, even for painters as visually different as René Magritte. While Surrealist images were sometimes patterned on screen memories, Surrealist objects were often modelled on sexual fetishes, which, in ...”

“... king, guided by the men, just one in a hundred, who had been blinded in only one eye (the atrocity may be authentic, but the numbers are certainly too high). It was also under Basil that the Venetians received favourable trading status in Constantinople in return for helping to supply the imperial headquarters at Bari in Puglia and policing the Adriatic ...”

“... was as if the westward movement of settlers were itself a force of nature.’ Chakrabarty may have been right that it’s impossible to write a history of the planet without giving up long-held views about causation, the sequence of events or the specificity of time and place – the bread and butter of most historical research. Then again, those ...”

“... a famous article by Konstantin Aksakov that contains this image, and one wonders to what extent it may have inspired Bakhtin to develop his own version of a deeply-rooted Russian ideal.Caryl Emerson informs us, however, that Dostoevsky is now very far from being the central preoccupation of Russian Bakhtinians. At the Bakhtin Centennial Conference, for ...”

“... around, becoming a sober, powerful and born-again buffoon. Sittenfeld, a Democrat and a liberal, may be doing more to humanise the Bush administration than all the press secretaries, publicists, apologists and spinners in the White House itself. Defending W, however, does not appear to have been the intention of the author. Several years ago, Sittenfeld ...”

“... or boys. Such attachments can lead only to disappointment and harm; Nero himself, she continues, may have been nerveux, but that did not make him any less evil. Why Nero? Because, as any French schoolboy knows from Racine’s Britannicus, Nero had his own mother killed. Two years after his mother’s death, Proust wrote an article extolling the filial piety ...”

“... family gatherings. Conversation in the street and outside the schools is fretful, but general. In May, news of redundancies starts to filter through (six months late, at a guess), and you nod and say nothing. These are young, highly qualified people, there is no need to panic. In the shops, the sales come early and often. An assistant in Dundrum shopping ...”

“... entrapment and negation. Not Sidney is the product of a symbolically long pregnancy. His father may or may not have been Sidney Poitier. His mother is a bit touched, but savvy enough to have invested, early on, in Ted Turner’s media concern. When Not Sidney is seven, Turner himself pays the family a visit. Soon ...”

“... poverty the congregation suffered in this life is easier for me to appreciate than the joy they may have felt about the next. I should have contacted the nearest surviving Baptist church a couple of miles off at Tilshead, but their website put me off: ‘We believe the Bible to be totally reliable and true, written by men inspired by God.’ Genealogy used ...”