“... Hercules dropping the pine-tree he’s just uprooted when he’s told that Hylas is gone – magic may lend grandeur to realism, but fantasy gains nothing from being made too real. On the other hand, the scenes on Olympus work well: Athena and Hera pay a visit to Aphrodite to ask her to make Medea fall in love. She is sitting on her verandah; she calls them in ...”

“... shift, you weren’t fresh as a daisy. Indeed, there were times when it really got rough: the roof may have been fractured and unsafe, the cutter may not have done his job well, the borer might have drilled the holes at the wrong angle and the wrong depth, or too far apart, or the shotfirer mightn’t have stemmed the shots ...”

“... after the event. We know it only from the way it acts as a drag on our discourse, as astronomers may identify a heavenly body only because of its warping effect on the space around it. For the Real to take on tangible embodiment, to crop up in the shape of voices or visions, is for us to become psychotic. The Real is the McGuffin, the joker in the pack, the ...”

“... a piece of land that will probably be built up in the future by developers. The slime and entropy may signify decay, but they are also the elements from which Bombay, and Mumbai, have been created and repeatedly redefined. ‘Artha’ protracts this exploration into crime, real estate, and, in this case, communal tension and violence. The story begins by ...”

“... when alone! … Nobody is to see this letter – be careful, Teddie. You are 19 – I am 34 – may it work out, after all?’ Dated 5 April 1923 and written on Frankfurter Zeitung notepaper, the letter was a declaration of love from Siegfried Kracauer, the Weimar Republic’s celebrated cultural critic, to Theodor Wiesengrund-Adorno, precocious teenager ...”

“... to the world of everyday or in flight from it. But the problem with an objective mode is that it may seem neat, clever and unembarrassing without becoming in any way important: the most successfully individualised of character-sketches may end by being about nothing but itself. At least MacNeice’s hostility to the ...”

“... for money or for the cause, arms and ammunition from them. Lt Atlas tells me how he had tried, in May, to organise a mutiny of two brigades and a battalion along with other officers. ‘Everything was ready. But the others didn’t want to go through with it, because they were afraid of being crushed by the air force.’ Here is the real meaning of a no-fly ...”

“... see, and represent what they’d seen. (The originals of many of Haeckel’s published pictures may have been wall-charts used in classrooms and public demonstrations: that’s one reason they look like they do.) Specialist students were expected to look at embryos themselves – they were by Haeckel’s time beginning to make serious use of microscopy ...”

“... cabinet. ‘What have the Houthis achieved?’ he asked. ‘They came to fight corruption. They may have saved a few million riyals but the economy has lost billions. They came to fight al-Qaida and now we have Isis.’ The Houthis’ takeover was complete, but it was becoming clear that it had less to do with divine intervention than with the machinations ...”

“... about this paternalist relationship we cannot easily say. That period of absconding in the 1750s may suggest that he found it irksome at that stage of his life, but there is plenty of more general evidence that he reciprocated Johnson’s affection. He named his first son Samuel, undoubtedly after Johnson, and when that child died in infancy he named his ...”

“... thousands and evicting them from the land. The more progressive elements in the Congress Party may have believed that with industrialisation and modernisation the problem of caste would solve itself. It never did. Capitalism itself may be caste, colour and gender-blind but the dominant classes utilise these divisions to ...”

“... abroad with her husband’s sister; Little Reunions, an autobiographical novel, suggests that they may have had a lesbian relationship. Bound feet didn’t prevent Yvonne travelling across continents. She learned oil painting in Paris alongside Xu Beihong (later a master painter of horses), and made friends with his wife and many artists. She skied in the ...”

“... far beyond their own shorelines, and the possession of islands, even islets like the Senkakus, may allow for a better claim to what would otherwise be treated as open ocean.The seas have often been thought of as ‘lawless’. But Bosco, who has an American law school background, contends that an international legal regime for the oceans has been in place ...”

“... The oligarchs who bought up some of the most expensive property in the world, including in London, may once have been members of the Communist Party, but they were also opportunists with no commitment to anything other than power and lining their own pockets. The vacuum created by the collapse of the party system has been filled by different things in ...”

“... about booming and book wars. ‘So,’ Ford remarks, ‘if one can keep oneself out of it, one may present a picture of a sort of world and time.’ He never did keep himself out of the picture, of course, and never meant to. The autobiography in Return to Yesterday often amounts to little more than local colour. Ford ...”