“... vomiting blood from an internal haemorrhage. It was 1914. His father, then living in a small town north of Paris, was not in the Army, because he was Dutch by nationality, and suffered in any case from gastric ulcers. There was no one to tend him, since all the doctors and nurses had left the town; and so he died, coughing his life’s blood up into a china ...”

“... that it is the former who have written the novels which present the past to the common reader.’) John Mercury is an exciting tale about those men who, risking transportation and prison, smuggled on carts and mail coaches, then up and down the railways, batches of pamphlets, broadsheets, newsheets, all clandestinely printed or copied out by hand – the ...”

“... are also more than usually absurd. Look at those silly clips of Paddy Ashdown playing hopscotch or John Major on his knees in a day-nursery or Tony Blair in his Newcastle soccer-strip. Who do these people think they’re fooling? Why don’t they treat us as grown-ups? What’s happened to the issues? To this, the politicians might retort: where did those ...”

“... from the nature of tragedy and the philosophy of Unamuno to the Jacobin terror, the works of John Stuart Mill, the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia and the threat of nuclear annihilation. Though the author is a distinguished academic, it is not a conventional academic study. It is a personal statement, a cry from the heart. Perhaps because of this, it ...”

“... a dust-sheet over her first husband. Miss Edwards excellently takes it off. The second husband, John Marsh, was an advertising copywriter and a PR man. He read her epic carefully and, among many other things, took out the dashes. Gone with the Wind was written in a peculiar manner. It is, of course, very long, but epics are supposed to be. (Beckett’s ...”

“... Garden’, painted in 1939, in fact shows a wall with a garden behind it, while ‘Landscape in North Wales’ (1938) is dominated by the wooden fence in the foreground. Each of the ‘Gardens in the Pound, Cookham’ (1936) is the realisation of its owner’s private fancy, and each is scrupulously defended from adjacent gardens by an iron railing. The ...”

“... after 1500 have been sent to the Musée National de la Renaissance at the Château d’Écouen, north of Paris. Such drastic deaccessioning would have been disruptive for many museums, but at Cluny, where the va et vient of objects has been the norm, it has created more space and clarity for what remains. The collection is itself the product of centuries of ...”

“... characters, even to moralise – although he makes the remark when a composite figure called ‘John’ complains that the author is exploiting other people’s experiences: ‘I am owed.’ ‘You’re not . . . You’re like a . . . a cannibal or something.’ And owed, perhaps, as the book too often seems to assume, a sympathetic attitude to his ...”

“... father. Somewhere along the way the urge to write intervened and he enrolled at the University of North Carolina. ‘Lawford is one of those towns that people leave,’ Banks writes of the (fictive) setting of Affliction, ‘not one that people come back to.’ Yet he continually returns to those towns, if only to confirm the wisdom of getting away. His best ...”

“... Thomas was the son of Maronite Christian immigrants from Kahlil Gibran’s village, Becharre, in north Lebanon. His assimilation was so thorough that he took the Al Jolson role of cantor’s son in a 1952 remake of The Jazz Singer. On the show, it fell to Uncle Tannous to expose the Lebanese heart beating within the American persona of Thomas’s ...”

“... flight by hydrogen balloon in 1783 as ‘a sort of physical rapture’, and the American pioneer John Wise insisted that the experience ‘never fails to produce exhilaration … the mind is illuminated.’ Yet what goes up must come down: ballooning’s Achilles’ heel, the impossibility of setting one’s direction of travel, means that even the most ...”

“... produced similar collections of the writings of Thomas Paine and his contemporaries in the 1790s, John Thelwall, Robert Owen and the British Utopians, and the responsibility for producing a Chartist canon could not have fallen into better hands. Few scholars can match Claeys’s ability to render 19th-century radicalism and socialism coherent by locating ...”

“... the thousands of young working men who flocked to hear him at mechanics’ institutes across the North and Midlands. ‘Trust thyself,’ he urged. ‘Whoso would be a man, must be a nonconformist.’ ‘Insist on yourself; never imitate.’ Emerson, in turn, was a great influence on Smiles, who borrowed the term ‘self-help’ from Emerson’s lecture ...”

“... was a formal dinner in Chapultepec Castle hosted by the Mexican president, Porfirio Díaz, in 1889.North America was suffering from ‘Spanish fever’. The obsession with the Hispanic had begun to incubate in the 1870s, slowly overcoming the deeply entrenched myth of the Black Legend, which characterised Spain as a country of cruel and unenlightened Catholic ...”

“... The great auk, or garefowl, was a flightless North Atlantic seabird and it tasted delicious, perhaps a little like duck with a hint of seaweed. It’s hard to be sure because by the 1860s the great auk was extinct. It had once been abundant: in the 16th century, a breeding ground off Newfoundland – known as Funk Island for the overpowering stench of guano – offered a welcome source of sustenance for European sailors crossing the Atlantic ...”