“... was apparently less slithery than in later years, but it was already primed to lead Adam and Eve astray with lasting consequences for human sinfulness. Jews and Christians have had a down on snakes ever since. By contrast, until at least the 17th century, the good folk of the Baltic region were notorious for cherishing specimens of the local snake ...”

“... practise familiarisation: the chronicler Oviedo cohabited with a sloth, while the Austrian Jesuit Martin Dobrizhoffer had a tamed deer that followed him around like a dog. When out of sorts, the deer was fed sheets of paper, which were ‘sweeter than honey to his taste’.In another example of cultural hybridity, early Mesoamerican celebrations of the Feast ...”

“... several of the accused.The museum’s self-examination predates its five-year redesign. On the eve of the millennium, two books about the imperial past caused a stir in Belgium: Adam Hochschild’s King Leopold’s Ghost (1998) and Ludo De Witte’s L’Assassinat de Lumumba (1999). They were met with queasiness or outright denial. Even so, De Witte’s ...”

“... been. Santo Domingo, as it was then called, was the leading port of call for slave ships: on the eve of the French Revolution, it was supplying two-thirds of all of Europe’s tropical produce. A third of new arrivals died within a few years. Haitians are still living with the legacy of the slave trade and of the revolt that finally removed the French. The ...”

“... Lines of succession make for neat narratives and it’s fun to fantasise a Margo Channing-Eve Harrington face-off, but Susan Sontag wasn’t the new Mary McCarthy, any more than Marilyn Monroe had been the new Betty Grable. Sontag the public sensation (as opposed to Sontag the perpetual grad-school grind) was the star-child of Pop Art and New Wave. To ...”

“... and couldn’t tell if he was of drinking age. Some dejected ex-staffers of the Maryland governor Martin O’Malley’s suspended campaign were drinking in the corner. I spoke for a long time to a local party apparatchik who said that everything about the state primary had changed in 1968, when Paul Newman came to campaign for Eugene McCarthy. It was the ...”

“... Canibali … barbarous Priests’ – a sneer which is turned back on the followers of Martin Luther in one striking mid-16th-century German woodcut in which Luther’s disciples perform a blasphemous parody of the Eucharist beneath an image of the Crucifixion: the reformer’s body, like Christ’s, has a spear thrust in its side, but it is ...”

“... for Lesbian and Gay Studies at City University of New York, headed by the celebrated historian Martin Duberman, has become a bastion of this dynamic new movement, but Duke University is also celebrated for its department of queer studies, headed by the redoubtable Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. Lesbian fiction has from the very ...”

“... promised to renew Trident and increase police numbers; Corbyn even agreed to fire Abbott on the eve of the vote, when polling showed her dragging down Labour’s support. Two things were crucial to Labour’s success in 2017: Corbyn’s image and Labour’s manifesto. Corbyn was patently not motivated by greed or ambition: he had an exemplary record in the ...”

“... of the supermarket’ in the eyes of admirers – occupies a position not unlike that of Martin Amis in English letters, as the writer by whom readers most like to be shocked, though beyond the commonplaces of sex and violence, their forms of épater are asymmetrical: flamboyance of style and bienséance of sentiments in Amis, provocation of ideas ...”

“... with the frightening fluency of his detractors in the anti-anti-communist camp. On the eve of Algerian independence in 1962, two years after Camus’s fatal car crash, the busy, dialectical Sartre was on the move, having sublimated his torment about the gulag to become a respectable (and ponderous) fellow-traveller. He sheared away after Hungary to ...”

“... over the next ten years, with $110 billion right away, of benefit particularly to Boeing, Lockheed Martin and Raytheon. The State Department celebrated the deal as supporting ‘the long-term security of Saudi Arabia and the Gulf region in the face of malign Iranian influence and Iranian-related threats’. But the last few months have seen a series of changes ...”

“... hierarchy that Aquinas and other theologians used Aristotle to defend, according to which Eve was naturally subject to Adam. Page agreed that in Eden some order of ruler and ruled would have been necessary, and similarly endorsed Aristotle’s principle that in every pair there is a pre-eminent part. But if, as the theologians also claimed, women’s ...”

“... unfolding in Guatemala. Guevara was keen to know more. He arrived in Guatemala City on Christmas Eve 1953.The decade of revolution in Guatemala had an extraordinary influence on subsequent events in Latin America. Embarked on by Juan José Arévalo in 1944, and radicalised by Jacobo Arbenz in 1951, the Guatemalan experiment permitted Communist participation ...”

“... of bourgeois hipsterville surrounded by local landmarks from Lena Dunham’s Girls, enlightened by Martin Amis sightings. Back then, baby, Brooklyn was badass and more than a trifle déclassé. To come from Brooklyn – ‘I was fiercely patriotic about Brownsville (the spawning ground of so many famous athletes and gangsters)’ – meant that you had ...”