“... the region the Greeks called Scythia, the vast steppe lands to the north and east of the Black Sea. Herodotus shows the Amazons acting peaceably, even amorously in a sexual rendezvous with neighbouring Scythians, but he also mentions a Scythian name for the tribe that suggests a darker side: Oiorpata or ‘man-killers’. The notion of female power ...”

“... read of the king being served spam. Of course, there were some inequalities, and an enterprising black market (Private Walker in Dad’s Army); and I still remember (or think I do) the farmers in Staffordshire who grudgingly took me and my mother in as evacuees towards the end of the war feasting on lovely fresh brown eggs while we had to make do with our ...”

“... up years ago – and because of it too: the pace of change has picked up since then. The mayor, Michael Bloomberg, sometimes talks about the importance of tourism to New York as if tourists were more important to the city than its inhabitants, but when you consider that 44 million tourists visited the city last year – an increase of 25 per cent since 2001 ...”

“... original bodies remain: one fossil recovered from north-eastern Russia was coated with a thin black layer less than a thousandth of a millimetre thick. In 2018, scientists used mass spectrometry to analyse the layer, revealing the carbon skeletons of cholesterol-like molecules. If these conclusions are correct, Dickinsonia would count among the earliest ...”

“... of the opposition was in hiding, in exile or dead. He was greeted at the hotel by crowds of angry black-shirted squadristi – armed fascist squads – who threatened him and smashed windows, demanding that he leave town. He was lulled into accepting the ‘protection’ of a local fascist leader, Carlo Scorza, but after being driven away he was viciously ...”

“... his family – but as ‘the saga of us as a people’: a template for the stories of all Black Americans, one which seemed to demonstrate that despite the systematic destruction of formal family ties by chattel slavery, children of the African diaspora could still recover family histories stretching back to the continent of their ancestors. Drawing ...”

“... who laboured to dig the tunnels retain a certain nobility: engineers and promoters in top hats and black coats, with gangs of navvies, white-shirted, leaning on their picks and shovels. These men took on London, its sticky clay, its buried rivers and polluted air, its monumental self-interest and its blind faith in scientific progress. The original calculation ...”

“... easy But no one warned that the mind repeats In its ignorance the vision of others. I am still The black swan of trespass on alien waters. The lines echo the description by A.D. Hope – much revered by McAuley and Stewart – of Australia as  a vast parasite robber-state Where second-hand Europeans pullulate Timidly on the edge of alien shores but ...”

“... interesting thing about the writer in question. Often, though, this invented self is a problem. Michael Wood’s oustandingly brilliant new book is in part a corrective to the public persona adopted by his subject. Wood calls this persona ‘Nabokov the mandarin’, and robustly describes it as ‘a set ... of ...”

“... swathes of British social policy. But that is because they are allowed to by politicians like Michael Howard. We do not know how effective as managers of opinion the tabloids are. On the one occasion when a politician (Stanley Baldwin) has seriously taken them on, the politician won hands down. What does not work is the attempt to anticipate the ...”

“... making: among other points he has established significant common ground between Burke and Marx. Mr Michael Freeman’s position in all of this is initially uncertain. The blurb seems to imply that he shows what a powerful case Burke makes for radicals to answer. But in fact Mr Freeman is much more interested in descriptive work than in recruiting the great ...”

“... limited to a small but dedicated following among writers such as Richard Ford, Stewart O’Nan and Michael Chabon. This came ten years too late for Yates, who died of emphysema and complications following minor surgery in 1992. His fiction is closely modelled on his own experiences and, perhaps unsurprisingly, it is a miserable place. The Easter Parade ...”

“... pictures, statues, vineyards, the Italian sky, dark-eyed peasants, opera-music, Raphael and old Michael, ‘Childe Harold’, the ‘Marble Faun’, ‘Romola’, and ever so many more ingredients, – the whole having I think taken me pretty well off my feet! Perhaps I ought to add Henry James. He has been perfectly charming to me for the last three ...”

“... Celebration was concerned, modern ended in the 1930s. The future as defined by the brochure from Michael Eisner’s Disney Corporation was to be found not in Walt’s skyscrapers and monorails, but in a long-lost past of white picket fences and pastel dormer windows, so lost that perhaps it was entirely mythic: There was once a place where neighbours ...”

“... he joined the RAF and performed in Ralph Reader’s Gang Shows. Soon afterwards he teamed up with Michael Bentine, Harry Secombe and Spike Milligan to form The Goons: slightly wearing to listen to now (I suppose you had to be there at the time) but routinely credited with having ‘revolutionised British post-war comedy’ – unless that was Monty Python or ...”