“... of hours of peasants toiling away’. Reno begins to understand that the way things look may mask the way things really are. In the villa, ‘all this beauty led me back to a sense of cruelty, to the people kept out, and those kept in, in the kitchen, the washing shed, the servants’ little stone cottages.’ So when she hears that ‘there was ...”

“... to their sons and the freedom that this new, consumer-driven lifestyle afforded them troubling. It may seem strange now to think of Britain in the 1920s and 1930s as a land of plenty, given how central ‘the Slump’ remains to the national memory of the 20th century. The wretchedness of mass unemployment in places such as Jarrow, ‘the town that was ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... all-British uprightness and exemplarity. The English denizens of what Harvie calls ‘Broonland’ may not be deceived, but so far they have found no alternative voice – and are unlikely to discover one in the approaching general election. True, there is the notion of voting Britain out of the European Union, but the appeal of such a ‘liberation’ is ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... had been followed by the murder in London of ‘the Italian Boy’, a victim of body traders who may have been serial killers. The New Poor Law, she argued, worked in tandem with the Anatomy Act by herding the poor into workhouses that prefigured Nazi concentration camps. Together, they streamlined the anatomy business and inflicted the ultimate stigma on ...”

“... at all times and in all circumstances wrong to take human life, whatever evil-doing the malefactor may have committed, then the time to say so was before Nuremberg and not immediately after. Souhami gives details of those tried and executed at Lüneburg. The trials were conducted by a British military court set up to deal with crimes against Allied ...”