“... after his death, but clearly many were not. There will be more work for editors. Some influences may seem trivial; a thought or a phrase encountered in his youth might remain hidden in memory for years and emerge in answer to a particular summons. For instance, Anthony Collett’s remarkable book The Changing Face of England (1926) was mined rather ...”

“... warmer climates rise up to engulf them. And Steve Jones and J.E.N. Veron warn that climate change may well bring about the end of coral reefs – if overfishing, disease, invading species and pollution don’t get them first. The surface waters of the open tropical ocean are poor in nutrients and almost lifeless because the warm upper layer does not mix with ...”

“... of secret are not so distinct. Rational and consciously kept secrets – a hidden nightdress – may coexist with murkier riddles: jealousy for one sibling, love for another. Sane, clear and restrained, Summerscale, like Ariadne, hands us a ball of red thread and leaves us to make of it what we ...”

“... supplies by ordering the purchase of kangaroo meat ‘at 6d per pound from any person who may deliver such at the Public stores’. This profitable trade was briefly monopolised by officers hunting vicariously through their convict ‘gamekeepers’, but within the year there was a thriving illicit trade in hunting dogs, as ‘with what seemed ...”

“... that conceit, although her Evangelists have cameo parts in later novels. Then came Seeking Whom He May Devour (1999), which brought back her original cop, Adamsberg (not seen since 1996, when he appeared in a sweet but slight mystery now translated as The Chalk Circle Man), in a story that addresses what has become Vargas’s major theme: the persistence of ...”

“... was responsible for keeping Montaigne’s name alive in the minds of a whole generation. She may have been obsessive and in many respects quite limited, but in this case at least her critical instinct was undeniably sharp. What to make of her? As it turns out, Diski makes a great deal of de Gournay’s idiosyncrasies. Apology for the Woman Writing ...”

“... have ended their IPL deals. By the end of this year, it’s being said, the Bollywood brigade may well pull out from the field, taking their sponsors with them. Meanwhile the Chinese government has decided that its youngsters should learn how to play cricket, just in case the shorter version becomes an Olympic event. Former test players from South ...”

“... many of the ladies she serves. She works very long hours for very small wages, but her customer may not be well off either: as they perform their different roles, they share a fantasy of the beautiful shop and the grand life in which they are taking part. When it comes to the supermarket, the mystique of the selling encounter has seemingly gone, and so has ...”

“... especially keen on becoming Vietnamese. Conquest was seldom peaceful, and sometimes led to what we may now describe as ethnic cleansing. The official Vietnamese story of the country’s origins, in itself not so different from what were once the dominant narratives of the settling of the American west and the Russian east, demands fealty to the idea of an ...”

“... the revolutionary tribunals of the Terror). Food shortages in Paris throughout May and June, and rumours of an attack on the National Assembly by mercenaries loyal to the monarchy, increased tensions, which flared into violence on 14 July. Enraged by the king’s dismissal of Jacques Necker, the finance minister instrumental in summoning ...”

“... social (unless it is the result of some psychotic outbreak or chemically induced tendency). ‘We may ask ourselves to what extent it is a social fact,’ Tarde wrote, ‘since it is a sudden and deliberate exit from society. In my view it is social nonetheless, for whoever exits in this way is driven for the most part … by pressures or ideas originating in ...”

“... judiciary weighs the cost of a new investigation of the former president, word is out that he may have collected €50 million from Gaddafi to fund his presidential campaign in 2007. Sarkozy was one of the most outspoken advocates of Gaddafi’s overthrow. Gaddafi’s death laid bare the cruelties of a new Palmerstonian age, which the West has tried to ...”

“... action to depose Mossadegh. That the widely respected Loy Henderson had shifted his own view may have been a factor. In November 1951 Henderson had warned against interfering in Iranian affairs: a ‘double-faced role in Iran’, he said, was likely to backfire. By the following July he had changed his mind, cabling Washington that he did ‘not believe ...”

“... rooms decorated with ‘anything you can imagine: for there is not any to be named, but you may find it in Prints.’ Woolley recommended pasting prints onto the walls as well as on ‘white plates and flower-pots’: instances of découpage (from the French découper, to cut up or out) before that term was coined. Another Robert Sayer publication, The ...”

“... two thousand years from the Bronze Age to the purges organised by monotheist emperors. Mithras may have been a newcomer in the classical Mediterranean, but he could depend on generations trained in the use of images. It is our lack of that training that makes the tauroctonies so difficult to understand, at least to our satisfaction, which is not ...”