“... as special, as ‘marginal’, as the capacity to recognise a sonnet in a foreign language (French). They undertook their labours ‘in a spirit of service’, says Heaney, service to ‘a cause worth supporting’, seemingly unaware (Irish though Heaney is) that ‘a worthy cause’ is precisely the most insidious and the most disastrous temptation for ...”

“... as the stories they tell’). On the front cover is Marie Antoinette’s face, from a well-known French School portrait, turned upside down, with a large white exclamation mark cut out of it, below the word ‘Kapow’ in a small font. On the back cover there’s a circular photograph of a rioter kicking in a plate-glass window somewhere. On the first ...”

“... for a while as live-in curators. In 1970 a new modernist extension was added, by Leslie Martin and David Owers, to show off more of the work in a larger space with more generous sofas. The latest development – funded by £3.65 million from Arts Council England and £2.32 million from the Heritage Lottery Fund – has involved entirely remodelling and ...”

“... past will always deaden the present. ‘The past belonged to him privately,’ Emmanuelle Alt of French Vogue said at the Grand Palais, ‘it was the future he shared.’ The English model Cara Delevingne came onstage wearing a dress of pale pink marabou feathers. A visual onomatopoeia, looking like the thing she described, she almost purred as she read a ...”

“... have consistently displayed a capacity for division of counsel and confusion of purpose in which David Steel would have felt thoroughly at home at any time. ‘An ill-organised miscellany of view-points’ is how Paul Addison, in The Road to 1945, describes it from 1916 on. Or as Neville Chamberlain wrote in his diary for 19 October 1935, ‘our party is ...”

“... double translation: the English versions of his novels have been translated from translations into French by the Albanian Jusuf Vrioni. But Kadare is worth reading for the peepholes he opens into what it’s like to be Albanian – his own mind-set being one of them. He was born in 1936 in the reign of King Zog – the period of The File on H. He is a poet as ...”

“... When​ David Graeber left academia in 2005, he had no intention of going back. His contract had been cancelled by Yale, supposedly after colleagues objected to his tardiness – though he suspected the real reason was that he had stood up for a student organiser whom the authorities wanted rid of. One of the brightest anthropologists of his generation, he scorned his peers on the way out ...”

“... to recover from its association with a dominant imperialism, and not just in Latin America. David Stoll is another talented US academic, from a younger generation, specialising in Central America, and with a particular interest in Guatemala, about which he has written a couple of interesting, and indeed path-breaking books. Is Latin America Turning ...”

“... a major industry if it could help it. The state bookmaker (the Tote, which operated on the French system of pooling bets) was forced to compete for custom with privately owned rivals, which could offer more tempting fixed odds. But the British government wasn’t about to let those private firms flaunt what they were up to. This was to be a commercial ...”

“... rehearsed entertainment; to find parts in the theatre, in London as well as New York; to act in French and Italian movies; and to appear on talk shows, where he was a great and good holder-forth. Any two minutes of him were apt to bring out something fresh. People think they know what makes a star, but there isn’t any one thing. I used to have an idea ...”

“... the mendacity or hypocrisy of a public man who says one thing and privately does another. In 2007, David Runciman devoted his Carlyle Lectures at Oxford to the subject of hypocrisy – not hypocrisy in general, but hypocrisy in politics. It is a wonderful topic. Everyone knows that politics is partly a matter of ritual and ceremony, deception and ...”

“... the summer of 2010, that is, when it was revealed that Low’s family was distantly related to David Cameron’s. Shortly after the prime minister returned from his first official visit to India, the Sunday Times broke the story that Low’s eldest son, Malcolm, had taken part in the brutal suppression of the rebels in 1857, leaving a graphic account in ...”

“... Born in Strasbourg, Hugues moved to Germany in 1989 and has been the German correspondent for the French weekly Le Point since 1995; she has also written two previous books about Germany and its borderlands. Hannah’s Dress won the European Book Prize – set up by the EU in 2007 to ‘promote European values’– three years ago. In telling the story of ...”

“... it inspired a rich store of legends about his astonishing feats of magic. As the medievalist David Collins asked, is it Magnus or Magus, Albert the Great or Albert the Magician? Irven Resnick and Kenneth Kitchell, who have long toiled on the Albertian corpus, provide a lively, accessible introduction to his life and thought. Albert joined the Dominican ...”

“... those who were ‘Wrong but Wromantic’. ‘I’m a Whig or little better,’ says Stevenson’s David Balfour by way of apologetic preamble to his admiring recognition of the un-Whig virtues of the Highland clans. Many must have been tempted to agree with W.B. Yeats’s (or his Sage’s) uncompromising answer to his own ...”