“... Mesopotamia comes across as a sad place. Almanacs of the Middle East will tell you that it has its fair share of sunshine, but it is easier to imagine it under a leaden sky. Mesopotamia – Chaldaea, Sumer, Assyria, Babylonia, Iraq, or any other of its many names – consists of a patchy flood plain, without much cohesion and with wide-open frontiers on two of its sides ...”

“... Twenty-five years ago A.L. Rowse, whose memory becomes more blessed in an age of research assessment exercises, made known to the world the riveting personality of the Elizabethan and Jacobean astrologer, private-enterprise medical practitioner, counsellor, sexual athlete and compulsive writer Simon Forman. Forman’s voluminous papers, case-notes, diaries and all sorts of other writings had been in the Bodleian Library since Elias Ashmole presented them in the late 17th century ...”

“... The writer in France is having a good winter, whose autumn novel is no sooner out than it is being roundly abused on all sides for its dubious attitudes, and is then passed over by the jurors of the Prix Goncourt, who would rather argument turned, as by custom it does, on the forgettability of the novel they have picked, not on any bad smell given off by its contents ...”

“... We might well think of 2000 as the year of emotional justice. In Private Eye last month a cartoon of a suited man being chased by a group of youths bore the caption: ‘I’m a paediatrician.’ That same week, a woman was besieged in her home by a group of youths who daubed the word ‘Paedo’ on her wall. She was of course a paediatrician. Whichever way we turn, we see populist measures outlined or tabled by politicians, populist judgments delivered in the courts, and unthinking, vengeful behaviour on the ground ...”

“... As the long skein of historians’ interest continues to unwind – from its once dominant focus on politics and warfare, to the successively ‘new’ fields of intellectual, social and cultural history – the newest of the new is the senses. Sight, sound, taste, touch, smell: each has a history, and each has beckoned to scholars for at least a decade ...”

“... On 17 February 2003, a 39-year-old Egyptian man was walking down a quiet street in suburban Milan on his way to daily prayers. His real name was Osama Nasr, but he was known as Abu Omar. He was a cleric and political militant, an opponent of the Mubarak regime, and had refugee status in Italy (which is very hard to get). A man in police uniform came up to him and asked in Italian to see his documents ...”

“... About two-thirds​ of the way through Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead, the eponymous narrator, now at high school in a poor town in Virginia, finds himself branded as ‘gifted’ by a perceptive teacher. This means that he has ‘to do the harder English, which was a time suck, reading books’. By this stage of the novel, you know that he secretly respects good teachers and real learning, and that his scorn for academic endeavour is just bravado ...”

“... When Mussolini​ took power after the March on Rome in October 1922, few thought he would hold office for long. Giovanni Amendola, a Liberal deputy first elected in 1919, failed to oppose the confidence vote on the new government. King Victor Emmanuel III had capitulated to the fascists, but Amendola had faith in Italy’s constitution and the strength of its democratic institutions ...”

“... Before the First World War, the Greenwich Village rebels Randolph Bourne, Max Eastman and John Reed regarded themselves as nationalistic liberators willing to draw on the country’s intellectual traditions. Eastman defined himself as an ‘American lyrical socialist – a child of Walt Whitman reared by Karl Marx’. But with America’s entry into ...”

“... classicus in the study of computing, robotics and futurism, and is discussed at length in both John Kelly and Steve Hamm’s Smart Machines and Tyler Cowen’s Average Is Over.2 Watson won, easily. Its performance wasn’t perfect: it thought Toronto was in the US, and when asked about a word with the double meaning ‘stylish elegance, or students who all ...”

“... Qabbala, or even claim to have inspected and made sense of the symbolism of the Revelations of St John of Patmos. Dukes was also sexually attracted to Stone – or Stone had been born yesterday if Dukes was not. Dukes had terribly vulnerable eyes which when they were hurt would fade over and grow misted with an affecting desolation. It takes a desperate man ...”

“... Emancipation involves escape, but having got out of the Victorian prison, what then? The new world may seem wholly delightful, like Blake’s Beulah or Keats’s Chamber of Maiden Thought, or the land of sexual intercourse we entered in 1963, so why not stay in it for ever? Somewhere at the top of the forest a little boy and his bear will always be playing ...”

“... There is a hint of Thatcherism about this New History, with its queer fondness for dates. For Number Ten it was, wearing her metahistorian’s hat, who recently ordered dates back into the curriculum, as the sine qua non of history. But surely not of literary history, which is parsimonious over dates, save where it measures out for us the life-spans of authors ...”

“... Robert Darnton’s reputation was founded on his monumental The Business of Enlightenment (1979). In this study of ‘the life-cycle of a single book’ Darnton tracked the creation, manufacture, distribution and reception of the fourth edition of Diderot’s Encyclopédie, 1775-1800. His account drew on the archive of the Société Typographique de Neuchâtel, on the Franco-Swiss border ...”

“... On the morning of Sunday 3 October, Russia’s most treasured icon was borne into the Bogoyavlensky Sobor, the Cathedral of the Epiphany, in Moscow. The Madonna of Vladimir, a 12th-century depiction of the infant Jesus resting on the arm of an abstracted Madonna, was delivered to the church by Zil minibus. In spite of his recent heart trouble, Patriarch Alexei of Moscow and All Russia, his great grey beard stirring slightly in the autumn wind, was there to see it up the steps and along the nave of the magnificently painted, glowing interior of the church with which he is most closely associated ...”