“... certainly false). He was also accused of privately parodying the Eleusinian Mysteries and this may well have been true: naughty theatricality was central to his character. The two incidents, however, were cleverly mingled and made the subject of a criminal charge. Despite Alcibiades’ requests for a quick hearing, when the fleet set out with magnificent ...”

“... is falling. Clutching a little case,He walks out briskly to infect a cityWhose terrible future may have just arrived.The screening took place in the Molenbeek warehouse where a group of architects make space for spontaneous performances, dance and discussions. ‘What we try to do,’ they told me, ‘is dissolve boundaries.’ Vaes’s vision of London ...”

“... and later to Nicaragua, where they were met by Sandinistas. Their daughter, Manuela, was born in May 1984. The years between then and 1991, when Escobar agreed to a truce with the government, were among the most violent in Colombia’s history, with one inconceivable event following another. On 6 November 1985, members of a guerrilla movement associated with ...”

“... believe he can escape hell, but he is cheerfully unrepentant, and he likes the idea that the place may be a fable, as Marlowe’s Faustus (erroneously) thought. Frank shrewdly remarks on the ‘strange velleities that suggest some concealed modicum of inner life’ in Fyodor Pavlovich, but the chances are that he has no inner life to speak of, only a kind of ...”

“... it’s clever, because it would be a shame if opportunities such as these were missed. One thing may affect the way another thing feels – skimming stones takes on a certain quality for Catrine because the way she’s taught to hold them, like clasping a waist between thumb and forefinger, is a reminder of Gilbert’s characteristic gesture – but this ...”

“... made for the people can be taken over by them: no wonder it’s so conspicuously policed. It may not be coincidence that the square makes the city look more like Beijing: Chengdu, the capital of a province that is about the size of France, is a regional power, competing with a handful of other cities to be the dominant force in western China. This ...”

“... moving in any direction’. He called one of his long sequences ‘Liquid Mercury’. ‘Any word may be as beautiful as water so long as it is free of restraints,’ he wrote. In an interview with the translator Simon Patton, he said: I thought the important thing about language at that time was not to change its form, not a question of how you used it ...”

“... present, horror and hilarity, with Nomi’s biting wit enhancing the ambient lunacy. The Nickels may be avatars of prelapsarian bliss, but the rest of their town is loco. Melancholia, suicide, a gulag stupefaction – even the weather, in best Last Days fashion, is moonstruck. It all feels absurdly melodramatic until we gradually realise that Nomi’s happy ...”

“... because I think a General Government necessary for us, and there is no Form of Government but what may be a Blessing to the People if well administered; and I believe farther that this is likely to be well administered for a Course of Years and can only end in Despotism as other Forms have done before it when the People shall become so corrupted as to need ...”

“... suggests that Wodehouse’s lack of interest in sex was due to a 1901 attack of mumps which may also have left him infertile. Best of all, his brisk account of Wodehouse’s wartime broadcasts takes up only a fifth of the book. The only truly eventful episode in Wodehouse’s long life was his internment in Germany in 1940 (he and his wife were slow to ...”

“... gained a measure of autonomy within the Austrian Empire, which was now close to total collapse. In May, the emperor fled Vienna. Austria was on its knees. The major powers of Northern Europe were preoccupied with their internal affairs. In a reversal of previous papal policy, the recently elected Pius IX had declared himself in favour of Italian national ...”

“... Julia. The new-life-in-the-middle-of-destruction idea does indeed sound ‘terribly boring’; as may the very notion of writing a contemporary novel set in London during the Blitz. But Waters grabs the clichés and transcends them. Like a skilled and lucky actor, she has found her own emotional correlative for the apparently distant experiences she is ...”

“... Roger Bellet, calls ‘a large and peculiar hole’ in the story the book is telling. Vallès may not have been in Paris in 1848, but he had followed the events with much excitement as a lycéen in Nantes, where his father was now teaching, and he wrote elsewhere that he had greeted the February revolution by declaring he was ready ‘to offer my arm to ...”

“... the girl from whom I had hired the car had spoken about the town with such despair. For me it may have been thronged with ghosts (and even a ghost, one couldn’t help thinking, would have difficulty in surviving amid those flat, meagre streets, on that sandy soil, under that high sky); for her it was just dead. ‘You know: dead!’ Her name was ...”

“... his habit of retaining all the abbreviations and original punctuation in 15th-century texts. There may be a case for doing so with manuscripts, although it does not conform to modern practice, but to reproduce 27 lines of Latin exactly as it was printed in 1472 is unnecessarily hard on the reader, especially when he is then told that the passage is ...”