“... never known for sure if the men were buried near the north-east wall of the cemetery in Caspe, a small town in eastern Spain, as some family members seem to have been told soon after their disappearance in 1947. But they had erected headstones in the hope they had been told the truth. Now that the grave had been reopened, it looked like Sancho and Mohino ...”

“... has been paid by the public health authorities. The number of more or less unavoidable cases is small, but the contagion is everywhere. The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai shows clearly, even through the medium of translation, that its author is among the small number in whom the disease was, if not congenital, at any ...”

“... as little as possible, but Wakefield was always one to muck in.’ The patrol could hear bursts of small-arms fire as they made their way along the road. Over the course of the next hour or so they met other patrol groups from the company. ‘We then did a U-turn on Green 9 and Green 12’ – these were combat zones – ‘and turned into an area known to us ...”

“... something that still requires a good deal of work. This would begin with Bloom’s pursuit of Stephen as a form of cruising – why else does he follow him? – with all his thoughts about women merely decoys, and would involve seeing Stephen as one of those loud, smelly, overeducated gay boys with bad teeth who were ...”

“... as it strikes ordinary lives. In The Child in Time, a child goes missing at a supermarket, and Stephen and Julie’s domestic existence is shattered; in Enduring Love, Clarissa and Joe witness the death of John Logan as he falls from a balloon, are changed for ever, and spend the rest of the novel trying to absorb the consequences of the spectacle; Black ...”

“... buildings there. Houston’s Pevsner, and my main means of imaginative entry to the city, is Stephen Fox, a professor at both the large and unlovely University of Houston, where I am teaching, and the élite Rice University, which has a beautiful campus laid out by the Boston architect Ralph Adams Cram just before the Great War; Cram’s original ...”

“... had got caught. The weather broke, the grave turned out to be Braque's, her shoes were a size too small ... Home and dry, she peeled off her socks and showed him the rubbed-red patch, about the size of a farthing, where a blister had formed, and expired. Fault Line There was so much right on both sides, Ken said, we could each found a church, and the people ...”

“... of the mountains, as there is immorality in the miasma of a marsh.’ His great rival, Leslie Stephen, future editor of the Dictionary of National Biography, put in a word for the morals of Fen dwellers (would he have defended the goings-on at Sodom, a thousand feet below marsh level?) but he, too, saw mountaineering as an ennobling pursuit, not to be ...”

“... a film. In 1994 a genocide was committed against the Tutsi minority in Rwanda. All else about this small East African country, ‘the land of a thousand hills’, is open to question and, indeed, bears re-examination. ‘Freedom of opinion is a farce,’ Hannah Arendt wrote in 1966 in ‘Truth and Politics’, ‘unless factual information is guaranteed and ...”

“... of Henry James – or rather, given the horror of much of what happens later, the atmosphere of a Stephen King who has learned to write like Henry James. ‘It had always been certain to start like this. If he was honest with himself, he had to concede that he had always known it really, at some level ... He thought, correctly as it turned out, that his life ...”

“... of the Bayreuth music drama but as an exploration of sensuous moments, as if one were to cut a small square out of a Titian and enlarge it as a colour abstract. This approach shaped the wonderful songs that Debussy wrote in the 1880s. By the 1890s he had developed it into a style that nearly transcended the textbook completely, but that functioned on its ...”

“... adjusting them to its juridical and administrative systems’. In short, he is the patron saint of small-town power-brokers. Giulio Cesare was clever enough to hold on to power and prestige throughout his long life. But it is easier to leave a bit of land to one’s heirs than to transfer a social role. He did what he could: he contrived to make his ...”

“... has the potential to create ‘human phenotypes that have never been previously observed’. Stephen Hsu, founder of the embryo screening company Genomic Prediction, believes that genetic engineering ‘will one day create the smartest humans who have ever lived’.This statement would have seemed absurd to a previous generation of biologists and ...”

“... orange tree in the grounds of the château. The King chose the orange tree, and sure enough a small chest smelling strongly of sulphur was found at its base. When Louis-Philippe opened it with a rusty key fastened to a turtledove, he found a piece of parchment that read: ‘This day, 6 June 1786, this iron box, containing six handkerchiefs, was placed ...”

“... writers so rarely use the phrase ‘my husband’. Then it started to happen again and again. Stephen Amidon, we are told in the Contributors’ Notes, ‘lives in London with his wife and daughter Clementine’. Mr Amidon’s daughter has a name, apparently, but ‘his wife’ does not. Amidon’s story, ‘Echolocation’, turns out to be about a man ...”