“... a woman who travels to Norway with thirty sex-starved sailors and a man called Stevenson – who may be based on Borges, who admired Robert Louis Stevenson. Williamson presents Borges’s visit to St Andrews as a coming to terms with his early lost love.The New Yorker writer Alastair Reid, a Scot who was one of Borges’s translators and with whom Borges ...”

“... in modern scientific thinking. He suggests – without ever labouring the point – that we may wish to keep an eye on whether other more respectable modern sciences, data science in particular, may also sometimes incline towards bullshit. But just as important, in Boxer’s hands astrology is a playground. Whether he ...”

“... a successor to the International Women’s Peace Conference of 1915, held its first meeting in May 1919 in neutral Zurich, despite Allied governments’ refusal to grant visas to the delegates. The representatives from the Central Powers bore marks of extreme hunger and suffering – the conference was all the more important for them because they had few ...”

“... allows us a glimpse of what he read and when. It’s clear he read a great deal and some of it may now seem esoteric – Socrates Scholasticus’s Historia Ecclesiastica, for instance – but there is little that is unusual for the time. Nor is there anything that suggests an early radicalism. The histories he read between 1639 and 1643 must have informed ...”

“... was handed in before Christmas; leaks suggest it proposed many urgent reforms, but apparently it may never be published. Instead, Whitehall departments are planning to set up and loudly publicise their own ‘British’ spending programmes, running parallel to the operations of Scottish and Welsh ministries. That was the real motive for the sudden additional ...”

“... were ‘theoretical distinctions, far removed from practice’. He is partly right: the categories may sometimes be found in late medieval histories of the early Islamic conquests, describing a world when the boundaries between Islamic and non-Islamic territories were relatively clear-cut. But the terms are also widespread in taxation manuals and collections ...”

“... G.E. Moore, drily reported that the Tractatus was ‘a work of genius, but be that as it may’ met the requirements for a PhD. The rest of Wittgenstein’s work was published after his death, and a lot of it abandons academic decorum for aphorisms, snatches of dialogue, cryptic musings, teasing questions and homely images. Benjamin, too, is a master ...”

“... in Vasari’s biography of Sebastiano, but, oddly enough, not in that of Michelangelo, and matters may not have turned out quite as Vasari describes. But there does seem to have been an estrangement between the two that lasted almost until Sebastiano’s death; in that period he painted almost nothing. Vasari explained his lack of activity by the fact that he ...”

“... meticulous evidence-gathering and record-keeping, and obsessive attention to detail. Trump may yet manage to escape the forces that oppose him, but his flighty and impulsive outbursts, Comey seemed to imply, are catnip to a career Bureau man. When it comes to political intrigue, the cover-up is often worse than the crime. That isn’t the case in ...”

“... until she met and married, despite considerable opposition, the heir apparent. But though Evita may have used Christian symbolism in the formation of her public image – the stories of Mary Magdalene and the Virgin Mary especially – she did not interfere in doctrinal matters. Theodora, on the other hand, took a great interest in Christian ...”

“... to bring prices back up. But both supply and demand can have long-term consequences: oversupply may continue because of the completion of drilling projects begun in times of scarcity, or demand may begin to lag after a boom because consumers have gradually responded to high prices with ways of permanently replacing oil ...”

“... away. He can stroll across the bridge for a litre of milk, though if he buys a British tabloid it may be a different edition from the one he’d get in the North. Signs in the South are in kilometres, in the North they are in miles.It is very clear travelling around the border that the major investor in recent years has been the EU. Domestic investment has ...”

“... Ian Allan’s shop with my children after our excursions to the Imperial War Museum. That sentence may say more about my childhood than theirs – and about the retrospective mood of Britain more generally – but I look back on that time fondly. A bright winter’s day, the journey south across the Thames on the top deck of a number 4 bus, the walk along ...”

“... the difference between a good and a poor outcome. Commonly the defendant will be insured, and it may be worth the insurer’s while to pay the claimant to go away.Such legal claims are not myth-dependent. In fact the Health and Safety Executive maintains a myth-buster website. But there has been a proliferation of fraudulent or inflated injury claims ...”

“... Ababa were forced to stay open for 24 hours to accommodate the vast queues. On the evening of 16 May, while results were still being counted, Meles declared a thirty-day ban on large gatherings and took direct control of police and militia forces. The EPRDF claimed it had won a majority; the opposition insisted it had won more seats than the official ...”