“... first its benefits to health and public speaking. To judge from one of his surviving books, Byrd may have been at home in the barbarously archaic Norman-French of the Tudor law courts, which he certainly exploited with enthusiasm in perennial litigation, as any self-respecting Elizabethan gentleman would. It is symbolic of a certain insularity in Byrd that ...”

“... he’s failed to say anything at all. The danger of delving into any spiritual practice may be that absolutely everything can start to seem as if it contains an important spiritual lesson. In this barrage of meaningful moments, though, there’s occasionally one that really could explain everything. In the next chapter, Parks returns to the question ...”

“... forced up to a quarter of a million Londoners to take shelter in the Underground every night. In May 1918, 43 German bombers attacked London; but this was their last major raid. The shortage of raw materials in Germany had become so serious that new planes could not be built in sufficient numbers, and those that were built were shoddily constructed and often ...”

“... the years appeared to confirm the Soviet image: his Third Symphony (1930) was entitled First of May and a Soviet music journal reported him as saying in 1940 that ‘to write a symphony immortalising Lenin’s name’ had always been his ‘cherished dream’ (though he never did write one). His enormously successful Seventh (‘Leningrad’) Symphony ...”

“... masterminded the genocide of 1975-79. Coming 30 years after the fall of the Khmer Rouge, the trial may seem a bit late. The five Khmer Rouge suspects facing charges of crimes against humanity and war crimes – the former president, Khieu Samphan; the deputy secretary of the Communist Party of Kampuchea, Nuon Chea; the prison camp commander Kaing Guek Eav; and ...”

“... but the clean structural lines of indignation keep shading off into the real world. Burt may be angry with his father, but he’s never going to get the reparation he wants for his childhood; especially not when it’s late at night and Roger’s forgotten the name of his hotel. Because earlier versions of the stories have already been ...”

“... of being the odd woman out in a number of studies of the poets of the New York School. The group may have been a chimera (in John Ashbery’s words, ‘we happened to be friends’), but the label – borrowed from the abstract expressionist painters in their circle, and marketed through Donald Allen’s anthology The New American Poetry – has somehow ...”

“... In The City of Dreadful Night, James Thomson’s narrator prowls ‘lonely streets/Where one may count up every face he meets’. This is what the metropolitan insomniac does instead of counting sheep. For J. Alfred Prufrock, faces are masks – ‘there will be time/To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet’ – and in The Waste Land these ...”

“... the cholera, but Haiti is awash in rumours. The Minustah press release denying responsibility ‘may have seemed like damage control’, Katz writes, but it had the opposite effect. The morning after it was issued, Katz and his fixer, Evens Sanon, discovered visibly unsanitary conditions and a stench at the base: broken pipes were releasing what looked like ...”

“... joke is typical of Chaucer, and it isn’t the only time he remarks on his chubbiness, but it may also express a kind of phonic national modesty. Italian is an easier language in which to fly than English. It has a higher frequency of liquid consonants, and rhymes come so easily that it’s sometimes difficult to stem their flow. The main translations of ...”

“... and the French have needed time to come to terms with many inconvenient truths. This may account for the fact that la Françafrique is such a lively anachronism in their public debates. But if France’s decision to intervene in Mali had anything to do with la Françafrique, at least some of the following conditions would be met: Hollande would ...”

“... now says she saw him write it (she also says the Russian secret services are following her). It may or may not be true. But it was Berezovsky’s final role: prodigal ...”

“... Hollywood’s ‘gigantic Jewish capitalistic propaganda’. Confessions of a Nazi Spy opened on 6 May 1939 to predictable controversy. The Legion of Decency, which had defended Riefenstahl during her visit, claimed the movie wasn’t so much anti-Nazi as pro-communist, while the powerful ‘radio priest’ Father Coughlin described the Warner brothers and ...”

“... commission that this year flat feet or short sight is no longer a legal excuse – which may be the truth and may be an attempt to extract another bribe. If you’re at university you can avoid military service (or take part in tame drills at the faculty instead): there is no greater incentive for young men to ...”

“... Sejanus is the ‘evisceration of individuality’. The techniques that van Es evokes so vividly may not have been quite so exclusively Shakespearean as he would like us to believe: plays by later rivals, notably Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi and Middleton and Rowley’s The Changeling, seem to have learned from Shakespeare’s example even if their ...”