“... and vague as something felt and not understood, I shall surpass myself in waves, ah, God, and may everything come and fall upon me. This is Joana’s voice. As her husband recognised, Lispector was 90 per cent Joana. The pity was that time and place, and her own diffidence, caused her to live more like a slightly petulant Lídia, even after their ...”

“... rightly points out, even if exoplanets turn out to be exponentially plentiful in our galaxy, life may prove to be an even more exponentially improbable occurrence. The easy leap made in the early days of SETI – from stars to planets to life to intelligent life – was never more than a conjecture. So the ‘eerie silence’ – no confirmed SETI contacts ...”

“... power, and had no British military support; images of harmony between the pashas and the Ottomans may be as romantic as representations of the traders’ lives as an Oriental fantasy. Though many spent their entire working lives in the Levant, almost all of the traders eventually used their earnings to establish themselves in British society. Their view of ...”

“... better than it looks, and on the other, that Nazi architecture is profoundly bad, however good it may look. When he was young, Krier argued that it was the melancholy duty of every architect of principle to give up any idea of building at all. ‘A responsible architect cannot possibly build today … Building can only mean a greater or smaller degree of ...”

“... 1940 and 1945 he turned away from nationalism and xenophobia – life in Nazi-occupied Paris may have prompted him to think again. Primer of Passions, written in Romanian during the war and published in French much later as Bréviaire des vaincus (1993), resonates with disappointment. Bidding farewell to his native country and welcoming exile and ...”

“... Italy has shown! What intelligence in rejection of sophistry, and what virility in execution! May it last!’ Fascism is not what Cameron has in mind, but his embrace of Blond’s crankish political philosophy makes one wonder what on earth he does have in mind. Cameron badly wants to win the election, and a big idea, however tainted its source, however ...”

“... have something to prove. That up-escalators sometimes induce a state of trance-like acquiescence may not be news to pickpockets. The only time I’ve ever been robbed on the Tube was while daydreaming up into the light. To judge by correspondence in the Times, there was plenty of this going on in 1930. On those grounds, you’d have to worry a little for ...”

“... moments when a character unexpectedly turns and addresses the house and, in a word, preaches. This may be because as a boy and a regular worshipper at St Michael’s, Headingley I heard a lot of sermons. I also used to go to Saturday matinees at the Grand Theatre in Leeds, though on occasion the sermons were more dramatic than the plays. This was particularly ...”

“... form’ of the mushroom becomes an occasion for reflecting on the search for form itself. We may know that a particular passion comes at a price, that it has negative consequences for us or those around us, but it’s hard to say a passion is all bad, or even bad at all. The mushroom hunter has ‘a feeling that was at once also a certitude, that through ...”

“... died begins to look like an even worse parent than the Elisa whose son survived. Except that she may be working on a false assumption, confusing correlation with causation. She takes it for granted that Silas’s survival is the reason everything is different, rather than just one of the many things that happen to be different, because his death was the ...”

“... the broadest level, it’s clear these equivalences exist (though what exactly they are rooted in may be conjectural): when Klee asks us to think of the struggle between an ‘aggressive straight line’ and an ‘intrinsically peaceful circle’, or the ‘victory of the fluid over the fixed’, we are happy to go along with him; there’s something more ...”

“... Hollar. As Kate Bennett writes in the introduction to her superb new edition of Brief Lives, ‘we may be able to hear, through him, the 17th century talking to and about itself.’ What do we hear? We hear that William Petty teaches anatomy at Brasenose and keeps a partially pickled body as a teaching prop, ferried to Oxford from Reading. That Thomas Hobbes ...”

“... recovered from the site has gone missing, apparently discarded by excavators, and the truth may never be known. The remains of female warriors have been found all over the steppe lands, from modern-day Bulgaria to eastern Mongolia, but they seem to be concentrated in the region between the Danube and the Don, now largely in Ukraine. By 1991, 112 women ...”

“... been the furthest thing from her mind. She was terribly sorry if she had given offence. Again it may have been the influence of the cocktail, multicultural in its own right, combining champagne and brandy from the Old World, sugar and bitters from the New, which gave Dad’s verdict its austere force. ‘That,’ he said, ‘is something you will have to ...”

“... do not want to be known as the modern-day Virgil who leads Dante through Hell (however much I may love Shalamov) … So I have omitted, as they say, the most heartrending details of camp life. I did not lure my readers on with promises of thrills and strange sights. I would have preferred to lead them up to a mirror. It’s a mirror in more than one ...”