“... within the same social groups’ and within towns and communities. Elites on both sides may have lamented the brutality of the peasants in their armies – Yannis Macriyannis rebuked his troops for their readiness to indulge in plunder and looting during the civil war in the Peloponnese – but the mobilisation of the rural poor created a new ...”

“... that a new national myth can help to provide a solution to our current divisions. But readers may wonder if the role of the historian today is not so much to devise new myths as to piece together a candid appraisal, no matter how alarming, of the fraught moment in which we ...”

“... letters survive, and Robinson analyses them at length, using them to suggest that Bodichon may have had a horror of sex. Hirsch more plausibly argues that her concern was that the ‘master passion’ of sexual desire, which she clearly recognised in herself, might overcome her reason. Chapman was eventually dispatched, but his antics surely helped to ...”

“... This struck me as worth writing about, too, but I didn’t. I just nodded and took the room.In May, the Black Lives Matter protests began. Some were in towns in eastern Kentucky. A friend had mentioned a man called Bill Turner to me, and I saw he had written something for a website called the Daily Yonder about his ‘unbridled joy’ on seeing ‘crowds ...”

“... sorts to the day before the meeting with Pascal, when she encountered Lucien’s uncle Robert, who may be planning something sexual for her, then a brief shower, and at last she’s off to her meeting, back in the narrative present. I wish I could say there is a reason for any of this, but I was left with the impression that Kushner had groped her way ...”

“... charcoal – in China, that meant the charred pods of the soap-bean tree. The recipe for gunpowder may have come from the kitchen, where meat was cured with saltpetre; sulphur was an ingredient in medicines. The optimal blend and its uses, including as an elixir, came from accident and experiment. A ninth-century Chinese text, the Classified Essentials of the ...”

“... one could produce beauty without caring about morality, spirituality or God.But however much she may have hated it, Campo was still marked by her time. She was just reaching adulthood when existentialism took hold in Europe. She, too, was searching for meaning in the ruins of European culture. She turned to religion and to fairy tales to restore a sense of ...”

“... admonished. ‘You are only commanded one small thing! That you should die so that the Führer may live a little longer!’ The more​ famous Surrealists, such as Breton and Ernst, left for the US and Mexico, which, again, had significant ramifications for young writers and artists in the Americas. However, when the Surrealists returned to a ravaged ...”

“... relatives and acquaintances alike. A victim who knows her assailant and who volunteers for testing may well hold the key to catching a serial offender.When this scandal hit the headlines, Goddard was no longer working as a victim advocate. From the late 1980s, she had become increasingly reclusive, then disappeared altogether. Much of Kennedy’s narrative ...”

“... husband, so the story goes (this kind of disclaimer recurs throughout books about ghosts: hearsay may not be a defence in libel law, but it is in the telling of ghost stories), a psychic warned Sarah that if she were ever to finish the building, the ghosts of all the people her family’s rifles had killed would return to torment her. Baines points out that ...”

“... rights advocate, argued that Americans ‘face the world, it seems, with fear of the ideas that may invade from abroad’. In 1972 the Supreme Court heard the case of Kleindienst v. Mandel, which concerned the refusal of a visa to the Belgian economist Ernst Mandel, a Marxist who had been invited to speak at various events in the US. American academics ...”

“... name was Fillide Melandroni, and she did once try to slash the face of a rival – the paintings may have been staged, but it wasn’t all pretend). Annibale Carracci took a look at Fillide as Judith Beheading Holofernes and didn’t think much of it: ‘I don’t know what to say except that it is too natural.’ Perhaps he was troubled by Fillide’s ...”

“... with sewage, those beaten or asphyxiated by guards, or handed off to foreign torturers. Vance may desire ‘a more Christian economy’, but it is one ringed with razor wire.Usha Vance is one of few people granted full reality in Communion’s otherwise solipsistic world and Vance credits her with much of his success. Speaking on TV about his ...”

“... of Anglo-British governance remains that all official information is secret but that officialdom may choose to bestow access to parts of it on people who are not otherwise entitled to know it. For the last few centuries this has principally meant the press and the media, and the state has always been aware that such access can be sold in return for political ...”

“... within Cornellis & Blome (Spufford is alive to the opportunities for women afforded by the war), may be Nonesuch’s most satisfying element. It’s unexpected that the price of Westinghouse, Paramount Pictures and Svenska Handelsbanken stocks should be one of the most interesting parts of a novel that includes angels, invisible bridges and rooftop battles ...”