“... a pale cloud . . . splitting in the April sky’: a dream of elsewhere. (The red of the wedding may also have a resonance with the ‘Chinaman’ who is mentioned at the wedding feast, and becomes part of the story’s essential subject later.) ‘Each one a deeper shade of red’ doesn’t describe the real order in which the differently red flowers ...”

“... who ‘slept while the first reports travelled around the world’ must be far from home. It may be naive now to regard Kennedy’s assassination as a loss of innocence, though it’s still possible to see why it seemed so at the time. The next day, Bill Houston, who’s stationed in the Philippines, goes boar hunting, and for no good reason shoots a ...”

“... was included in a mass arrest of former tax collectors. He was convicted of embezzlement and, in May 1794, guillotined along with 27 of his colleagues.The perfume industry got a boost from Napoleon, who as first consul led the fashion for ever more elaborate toilettes, getting through sixty bottles of scent a month: he poured it in his bath, added it to wine ...”

“... appeared online. Palestinian teenagers followed the fighters on bikes or horses into land they may have heard about from their grandparents but was now transformed beyond recognition.After the bases came the settlements, and the massacres that no previous violence can justify. Families were burned or shot in their homes. In total, the fighters killed about ...”

“... he unknowingly wanted: friendship as a form of unreturned devotion. Even a king with diversions may need something else. ‘What is friendship?’ the narrator asks. ‘I do feel some for him, and where does it get me? I don’t know what I want, but I’ve had it up to here with what I’ve got.’ ‘Friendship’ is among the last words of the book, as a ...”

“... comes from somewhere that might be nowhere. Daney’s summary of the speech is: ‘Whatever I may say to you, I speak from a place I’ll never be again, a place you haven’t yet reached.’ Daney left Cahiers in 1981 to write columns for Libération; he died of Aids ten years later at the age of 48. He was remembered earlier this year in New York at ...”

“... style (Augustus is said to have described it as ‘ringlets dripping with perfume’). The first may well be genuine – Suetonius had access to the imperial archives until he was booted out by Hadrian – but as Gowers warns, they ‘line up almost too perfectly’ with the style and subject of a fragment of Maecenas’ own work.Modern scholars have used ...”

“... At least religion involves billions of people, however doubtful its socially transformative powers may be. The redemptive role of art is the opium of the intelligentsia, a mirage that refuses to be put to rest: Simon Schama told us recently on television that art is where a divided society can find some common ground. What can be true of art, however, can ...”

“... don’t inherit it. Such effects can be counterintuitive; a genetic variant in your parents’ DNA may make you more intelligent when you don’t inherit it, but have the opposite effect when you do.As researchers have come to better understand these issues, they have developed experimental designs to estimate the contribution of the various factors in ...”

“... of agnosticism. Maimonides seems to be saying that if you would like to believe something you may do so, so long as you first verify that there is no compelling, rational argument to the contrary. And creationism was something Maimonides wished to believe. He calls it the ‘indispensable basis of the whole religious Law’, presumably because a God who ...”

“... joining up the geniuses.The reason these courses have not hitherto gained much ground in Britain may well be our specialist and amateur traditions, which supposed, on the one hand, that no one could properly understand a text of Plato until he had mastered Denniston’s Greek Particles, and on the other, that the kind of general knowledge of Plato that a ...”

“... that fill the 12 rooms of Rodchenko & Popova: Defining Constructivism (at Tate Modern until 17 May). The material is lively, inventive and memorable, poignant even, because you know that early Russian modernism didn’t die a natural death but was cut down within a decade or so of its germination. Popova’s pleasure reflects the constructivist belief that ...”

“... that gave us the phrase ‘bluestocking’ or ‘stuck-up cunt’. The Daily Mail sneered that she may have known who Thersites was, but she didn’t have a clue who won the most recent series of Celebrity Big Brother or know the name of the new manager of Chelsea FC. I really do not want to feel negative about anyone the Daily Mail criticises, nor in the ...”

“... and again inevitably, we have the famous plate from Corinth showing two lovers in a garden. It may be hard to ring the changes, but that’s no reason not to ...”

“... detaining them in immigration removal centres are providing various ‘services’ in Iraq. They may, to take one example, land at an airport managed by Serco. Sodexho, Kalyx’s parent company, has gone into catering, but it’s not likely that repatriated Iraqi refugees will be eating the meals they prepare: the company’s eight-year, $881 million ...”