“... England, Indian food was thought to be anything sprinkled with curry powder: a substance Elizabeth David described as ‘unlikeable, harshly flavoured, and possessed of an aroma clinging and as all-pervading in its way as that of English boiled cabbage or cauliflower’. ‘To me the word “curry” is as degrading to India’s great cuisine as the term ...”

“... wonders why ordinary men and women generally obey their rulers. It was a problem that perplexed David Hume as well. ‘Nothing is more surprising to those who consider human affairs with a philosophical eye,’ Hume wrote in 1758, ‘than to see the easiness with which the many are governed by the few ... When we enquire by what means this wonder is brought ...”

“... for once, rather seriously and ‘knowingly’. 25 October 1930. Emerson says: ‘Today is a King in disguise.’ When I’m with Sieg there is nothing in disguise. I do miss him – but I’m better alone. He sent a message through his doctor that, since Sassoon’s last visit, his feelings towards him were not what they had once been: Sassoon upset ...”

“... river, like memory, full of people, places, ideas, things, all with an ambiguous reality status. King Kole, the Aboriginal cricketer, standing at the rail of the Paramatta, watching a pilot-boat butt its way across Gravesend Reach, knew he had arrived at the Land of Death. Gravesend did for Pocahontas, the Indian princess, too: she died there, on her way ...”

“... archness when he speaks of ‘the great intellectual Western racialists such as Francis Bacon, David Hume, Immanuel Kant, Thomas Jefferson and G.W.F. Hegel’, finds racialist ‘truths’ less easy to come by. After all, as he points out, when blacks begin to produce ‘literature’, they make a revolution by that very activity. The eruption into ...”

“... to Robert Harris, with the memorable line: ‘Fuck Dacre, publish.’ Meanwhile the historian David Irving denounced the diaries as fakes, on the radio and television of three countries, although he had no sound evidence for saying so. Two weeks later, when everyone else was saying they were fakes, he made the front page of the Daily Express and the Times ...”

“... 17th century the same international concerns produced the Evangelical Union, the eirenicism of David Pareus, and the disastrous attempt, which provoked the Thirty Years War, to annex Bohemia for the reformed cause. In the next generation they produced the globe-trotting ecumenical initiatives of Dury and Comenius. Those themes, rich and richly ...”

“... the mere process of joining up became a major hurdle. The clandestine volunteers were sent from King Street to the Comintern headquarters in Paris, and then down to Perpignan, egged on by the clenched fists of peasants and shadowed by the police. After hiding in the woods they had to walk over the Pyrenees, dodging the searchlights and bullets of French ...”

“... Montgomery Clift. De Sica had originally planned to make Bicycle Thieves with Hollywood funding. David O. Selznick, the prospective producer, wanted Cary Grant for the lead role; De Sica suggested Henry Fonda. Umberto D was first conceived as a British film, starring Barry Fitzgerald. Zavattini, who had experimented with non- actors, encouraging them to ...”

“... themselves on the British imagination. One of these was the massacre at Kanpur, where the Maratha king Nana Sahib turned against a corps of about a thousand Europeans, laying siege to their cramped entrenchments. After a punishing fortnight under fire, and some 250 deaths, the British surrendered with a promise of safe passage to Allahabad. But as they pushed ...”

“... In​ 1676, during the period of colonial conflict known as King Philip’s War, Reverend Hope Atherton was the chaplain accompanying Captain William Turner’s militia on their march to an Algonquian encampment near Deerfield, Massachusetts in the Connecticut River Valley. There they ambushed the sleeping tribe, slaughtered some of them and drove others into the river, which swept them over the waterfall – now known as Turners Falls – to their deaths ...”

“... soil as another man’s serf, even a poor man’s, who hadn’t much to live on himself, than be King of all these the dead and destroyed.’ Homer’s words might have been written for the 20th century, for they need little change to make them appropriate to the nuclear age. There must be few lives, even in the poorest country, which would not be preferable ...”

“... separated, at birth, who goes on to discover that he is his own non-existent, royal twin (Oedipus, King Arthur, Krishna). Wright regards ‘mythologising’ as little more than ‘lying’: separated twins who overdramatise their resemblances, or make up stories in order to get into the press, are ‘mythologising’, a charge supported by the likelihood that ...”

“... Menzel was one of the two foremost German painters of the 19th century, the other being Caspar David Friedrich.’ Unusually, he was an illustrator before he turning to painting, and towards the end of his life he turned away from painting again, devoting himself mainly to drawing. A dwarf, born in Breslau in 1815, he grew up in the milieu of his ...”

“... Lorenzo and Giuliano, were young and vulnerable. After secret negotiations with the Pope and the King of Naples, the Pazzi and their allies decided to kill Lorenzo and his brother during Mass in the city’s vast cathedral, a ceremony scheduled to be conducted by Pope Sixtus IV’s nephew Raffaele Riario, a cardinal. As Martines shows, churches were by no ...”