“... in French. The London puy shows no signs of having survived into Chaucer’s lifetime, but it may still have offered a model for the storytelling competition of The Canterbury Tales. Butterfield suggests too that these societies offer a context for the poetic exchanges between a number of late 14th-century French poets, perhaps extending as far as ...”

“... gap towards the end. After all the achievements, the marriages, the medals and the anecdotes there may be a decade or more unaccounted for before the date of death. Speculating on what might have filled it Miller lists the terrors of old age, the modern four last things that have replaced death, judgment, heaven and ...”

“... and seemingly interminable slog that is required to build up to any revolution’s launch: it may take years, even decades, once the match is lit, for it to ignite a mobilisation large enough to create a truly national initiative. One of the individuals who still keeps the revolutionary spirit alive in these bleak times phoned me this week, and this time ...”

“... to slide. A £250,000 loss was made on the Sydney Harbour Bridge. Aldous Huxley, who visited in May 1931 for Nash’s Pall Mall Magazine, noted that Britain, once an iron-making pioneer, had long since been overtaken. Bolckow Vaughan had collapsed into Dorman Long in the 1920s, Dorman Long was nationalised to become part of British Steel in 1967, British ...”

“... or America. But it was not so. The Kyrgyz people quite simply lost their patience.’ The reality may be a little more complicated than Otunbaeva’s response suggests. The Putin-Medvedev duo certainly seems tacitly to have supported the shift of power and has been quick to endorse the interim government. Putin’s terse observation on 8 April that ...”

“... assessment of the peculiarity of a locally rooted mini-sect. And yet, insignificant as they may be, the fortunes of this small, quarrelsome, fissiparous and yet cohesive group on the edge of the cataclysms of the 1930s and 1940s shine small beams of light into its darkness. Most of Davis’s book naturally deals with this phase of their development. The ...”

“... certainty that guarantees Russian life a stable past and future, whatever individual rulers ...”

“... him that there was ‘one unassailable certainty: Greater Germany’s victory in this war’. In May 1945, with the Russians already in Berlin, Franz – wounded and on home leave – is wondering when the ‘Miracle Weapons’ will finally be launched to turn the tide. The Führer seems to be leaving it rather late. But that is probably because he has ...”

“... her first novel). One of the reasons for the success of Gone Girl and The Girl on the Train may be that they make violence not just compelling, like any horror story, nor just manageable, like detective stories (which always reassure us that the worst will finally be contained by the law), but digestible, a bit like consuming a TV dinner, legs ...”

“... J. Edgar Hoover, who headed the FBI for 48 years between 1924 and his unexpected death on 2 May 1972. For decades before Watergate every president came into office determined to usher Hoover into retirement; on every occasion Hoover was able to convey that he held materials in the FBI files that could damage the new president, and that he could only ...”

“... such limited standards of comparison with the/sexual/behaviour of other characters people. But I may be wrong. Perhaps everyone knows what everyone does in bed sexually nowadays. But if they don’t know – if sex is not a widely illuminated social area in which every person’s or every couple’s activities can be surveyed by everyone else – as ...”

“... I don’t mean some cosy idea of multiculturalism and human togetherness. Opportunistic secularism may have run out of steam, but if the BJP thinks it knows what to replace it with, it’s mistaken. For the first time since Independence, India feels unliveable in, not just for minorities under assault but for large swathes of the population. The BJP is a ...”

“... be writing. Each collective choisi (pastparticiple,you recall,of choisir)without exception and – may I add – very naturally desires for the nonce nothing but Adolph’s Absolute Annihilation,Coûte Que Coûte(SIC). A man who once became worshipped of one thousand million pubbul by not falling into the ocean while simultaneously peeping through a periscope ...”

“... The green in Lucretia is death incarnate. The pot plant in The Jewish Bride is a ghost. It may be that partly this has to do with practicalities, material events – fading and darkening of colours, the price of pigments and so on. But this cannot be decisive. We are dealing so clearly with an aesthetic choice, which is in turn an ethical and ...”

“... a hero from the Spanish Civil War who’s gone into hiding. Matthiessen’s filial ambivalence may have been complicated by the fact that he’d joined the CIA, where his main job was spying on potential members of the Communist Party among literary expatriates in France. In 1953, he’d founded the Paris Review in part as a front for that work, a detail ...”