“... new friend, invited her once to Haworth, and told her a good deal about the sad family history. It may have been for these reasons that Patrick Brontë commissioned Gaskell to write his daughter’s biography, a task that could have been made to order for her. In the first volume she set her motherless heroine as a domestic, shy but compassionate feminine ...”

“... should place a priority on relocating Siberia’s youth,’ Hill and Gaddy declare. ‘While it may seem harsh, the challenge of maintaining the stranded elderly population of Siberia is something of a finite proposition.’ Well, it does seem harsh. To subsidise the young to flee Siberia, leaving their parents and grandparents behind to die off in the land ...”

“... psychopaths . . . The comfort is that you are all serving the same cause in the end, and the time may come one day when you may be able to cross over and join Kandapalli’s people.’ Willie spends seven years among the psychopaths. He lives a boring, occasionally violent and, above all, pointless life. The guerrillas ...”

“... structure of government. These ‘empires’, as the Spanish called them, the Inca and the Aztec, may not have been quite the great barbarian civilisations that Cortés and Pizarro, always eager to overplay their own achievements in having conquered them, made them out to be. But they were quite unlike most of the loose, decentralised indigenous societies ...”

“... editors. It’s not enough to prevent Count Ciano going to Germany to sign the Pact of Steel on 22 May 1939. Weisz flies back to Berlin to cover the event for Reuters, finding time for more great sex with Christa (‘“God,” she said, “how I love this.” He could tell that she did’) and failing once again to persuade her to leave with him. Back in ...”

“... believing her to be Mead’s wife. Pilkington then wrote to Mead asking for assistance, and may well have mentioned her illicit knowledge of his affairs (blackmail was a motif in her life, and people subscribed to the Memoirs in order not to be named in them). Mead sent her one final guinea and refused further contact. Clarke’s comment on the incident ...”

“... Irish have become more cosmopolitan, Irish identity has been packaged for the market. The danger may be that in the process more open definitions of Irishness will be closed down. Irish ethnic branding exhibits a strange mix of insecurity and confidence, but confidence is certainly part of it. Foster makes a strong case for the period from the 1970s, and ...”

“... scientific discovery as inherently irrational and not subject to planning or organisation, but it may be thought that more than romanticism or nostalgia was involved. Clearly the images and consequences of goose-stepping soldiers and chanting crowds were still vivid for the postwar generation, and what managers of corporate science were urging as the ...”

“... racism led him to defect to the Haganah, the Jewish People’s Army led by Ben-Gurion. (He may also have been uneasy about being part of an organisation that was attacking British soldiers in Palestine when his brother Werner had died in 1941 as a British commando in Ethiopia.) Avnery’s teenage affiliation with the Irgun inoculated him against the ...”

“... leaves the subject free to accept or reject other ‘more saturated Jewish forms’. The person may choose to give it further attributes – religious, nationalist, communitarian, cultural and so on. But none of these Jewish shapes – which depend on basic choices since they can be assumed or renounced – can rightfully claim the allegiance of an ...”

“... like people, and many of which, in the way of fables, have human hands and animal feet. There may also be signs of the hard life of a schoolmaster in his distinctly clerkly writing. His extended versions of Aesopian fables (which were standard schoolroom texts, used in Latin lessons) conclude with morals which suggest a teacher diligently reminding his ...”

“... and study of the medieval Hindi Epic of Pabuji, is the latest to take up the challenge. He may escape the curse because his version is incomplete: though it spans the entire text, he has translated only 11 per cent of the Sanskrit, bridging the translated passages with detailed summaries. Half the book is translation, half summary. He covers the ...”

“... shop replied curtly: ‘We don’t sell that kind of thing.’ I was ashamed to have asked, and may even have muttered something about its being for a friend in Paris, or some other implausible excuse. I eventually bought a copy in Abbeville, some twenty minutes’ drive away. For a long time, however, whenever anyone asked about my work, or if the ...”

“... to adopt him as their leader, in the hope, as they put it, that ‘under your guidance we may be able to defend the truth against those who are superstitiously religious.’ The manuscript of the Ethica was more or less complete by 1665, but Spinoza was wary of controversy and refused to publish it.Meanwhile, he was at work on another project: a book ...”

“... specialists. These are generally interpreted as moves towards a more mercantile economy; but there may well have been a shortage of native talent as a result of alarmed opposition exercised by those in authority, who resented new paths to advancement that bypassed old landed values altogether. When the poet Theognis complained that money was now the root of ...”