“... Rhine’ – that the song had been worth three extra divisions to the Prussian Army. Ungerer’s may well be a story on stilts. But it is one he thinks revealing of what it means to be an Alsatian. When he joined the French Army to do national service, he was put in charge of training his unit. Then he made a discovery:The French marching songs will not ...”

“... manuscript held in the Bodleian, one recipe gives a charm to secure favours, promising that ‘you may have whatever you want.’ It consists of a short prayer and a sequence of letters with no recognisable meaning, separated by crosses. At some later date, a reader went through the text with a needle, pricking pinholes through the letter shapes of the magical ...”

“... Carthaginian system of government is known only sketchily and some of what Latin authors tell us may be calqued from Roman models. Two elected magistrates called sufetes were elected annually from among the city’s leading families but, unlike Roman consuls, did not command armies. Generals were elected separately and there was also a powerful body of ...”

“... just that the volatile aromas in a ripe tomato are killed by the cold, or that the ripeness may be generated by ethylene rather than the sun, but that most of the tomatoes grown commercially don’t have the ‘genetic capacity’ to be delicious, as the plant breeder Harry Klee told Twilley. Tomatoes, she writes, are bred for ‘the sturdiness to be ...”

“... are even some snatches of gossip and odd bits of biography. The young Lacan met James Joyce and may have psychoanalysed Picasso. He was also consulted by Sartre, who happened to be having hallucinations at the time. We learn that Foucault and Derrida couldn’t stand each other, rather as one imagines Gordon Ramsay and Jamie Oliver don’t get on too ...”

“... of papyrus from the rubbish dump at Oxyrhynchus suggest that customs taxes on trade with India may have generated one-third of the total income of the Roman exchequer. Roman commentators were in despair about the drain of gold to India. Pliny the Elder called India ‘the sink of the world’s most precious metals’ – the converse of the complaint under ...”

“... Great Council which met at Whitehall that evening. James himself did not arrive in London until 7 May, having deliberately waited until after Elizabeth’s funeral.All the same, accounts of Elizabeth’s ‘nomination’ and James’s straightforward succession are ultimately misleading. The queen had not only steadfastly refused to name a successor but had ...”

“... Laynez-Ambrosio, an 18-year-old US citizen who lives in West Palm Beach, Florida, was stopped last May by highway patrol. As soon as the other two male passengers in the pickup truck his mother was driving were flagged as undocumented, Laynez-Ambrosio was dragged out of the vehicle with them (they used a stun gun on one of the other men), arrested and ...”

“... moment isn’t something closer to hopeful cynicism. That isn’t necessarily the paradox it may seem. The impression I have after years of teaching is that cynicism is the defining characteristic of many sharp-eyed young people. Pessimism is not fatalism, and neither is cynicism. Cynicism doesn’t mean ‘I don’t care’ or ‘It’s ...”

“... It is barely worth speaking of anything as tangible as motive in Robert Ford’s murder. Robbery may have been involved, though McCluskie has always denied that it was. Any part it did play was tangential. ‘We had a go at him to get some money,’ Reynolds told the police, ‘he gave me 10p and when I asked for more he said he didn’t have any and ...”

“... Know your enemy, and know yourself, and you may fight a hundred battles and not lose one. Sun Tzu, The Art of War, c.450 BC The historian William Manchester, who served with him in the Pacific, said he was the greatest soldier in American history. Never much regarded in Britain, he is still recalled with loathing in Australia ...”

“... the middle of the 19th century, clinical medicine had almost no beneficent impact on health and may well have caused more harm than good; doctors at the Battles of Gettysburg or the Wilderness had no more to offer wounded soldiers – except perhaps opium – than did their predecessors in the Persian or Punic Wars. As late as the Twenties there were only ...”

“... secret agent. Al-Shiraa, the Lebanese magazine that leaked word of the arms supply on 1 November, may well have been enlisted by his political enemies in order to cripple his chances of greater prominence. There are at least two precedents for such American expeditions to Iran, both of them interventionary in the most literal sense. One was the notorious ...”

“... closer to getting a sale.’ Heale was one of 17 Ukip members elected to Kent County Council last May, making them the second biggest party. (Of the eight seats in Thanet, Ukip won seven.) Before that, in 2003, Heale stood as an independent against a Tory councillor but lost. Before that, he was a Conservative for twenty years. Before that, living in ...”

“... the past 20, 50 or a hundred years. It rarely refers to other books at all. Literary scholarship may not be an undiluted joy to its readers, but at least it’s usually founded on an ideal of the collaborative accretion of human knowledge. It’s frustrating that McGurl, a literary historian, occasionally seems to ignore the whole history of literature ...”