“... not be Czechoslovakia’. Bush was reportedly furious at being compared to Chamberlain, and the White House press secretary called Sharon’s remarks ‘unacceptable’. Sharon offered a pro forma apology, but quickly joined forces with the Lobby to persuade the administration and the American people that the United States and Israel faced a common threat ...”

“... But to quote Wikipedia (not a particularly ‘good’ line, but what can you do?): ‘musicologist Michael Lorenz [has proven] that the woman was actually Victoire Jenamy, a daughter of Jean-Georges Noverre, a famous dancer who was one of Mozart’s best friends.’ Now, this paper was about fifty pages long. And there were extensive footnotes citing ...”

“... in his essay ‘Shooting an Elephant’, written 17 years later, that his ‘whole life, every white man’s life in the East, was one long struggle not to be laughed at’. The horror of what happened that day sank in immediately. Gerard Wathen, the principal of Khalsa College, who had intervened to stem the street violence of two days earlier, told Dyer ...”

“... Riesman. A parade of unreliable associates – including a memorabilia mogul who claimed to be Michael Jackson’s best friend – tried to persuade him they’d found a way to turn his celebrity into cash. Collaborations with Whoopi Goldberg and RZA from the Wu-Tang Clan were mooted but didn’t happen. (‘If they’re popular with young people,’ Lee ...”

“... patrolled thoroughfare then than today’s bitter cemetery. It is assumed the Bishop of Hippo was white, but it seems a bit unlikely, given his birthplace. The Christ child whom he saw labouring to drain the sea appeared to him on the beach at Civitavecchia near Rome, the port where Stendhal was the French consul 14 centuries later. The story lives on in ...”

“... may be yet. The closest parallels to Aids in epidemiological terms are syphilis and Hepatitis B. Michael Adler, in Aids and the Epidemics of History, lists the sudden appearance of syphilis (at the end of the 15th century), its asymptomatic carrier state and predominantly sexual means of transmission as the chief points of similarity. Hepatitis B, as Baruch ...”

“... a snowy, traffic-stopping night in Brighton when the people grouped themselves fearlessly in the white space of the street, which suddenly looked exactly like an old painting. This comic space is partly, as people say nowadays, a matter of gender. After remarking that real houses in ancient Athens were small while the public spaces were magnificent. Barton ...”

“... is not a substitute. Alexander Robertus Todd, Baron Trumpington, was the son of a responsible white-collar employee of a railway company who later became managing director of a substantial department store in Glasgow. Todd describes him as an ambitious and hard-working man who went to work at the age of 13 and from then on was self-taught by attendance at ...”

“... the names of slaves, about pseudonyms (Thackeray wrote as Charles Yellowplush, Ikey Solomons, Michael Angelo Titmarsh, Bashi-Bazouk, Folkestone Canterbury, George Savage Fitz-Boodle, Dr Solomon Pacigico and Launcelot Wagstaffe), about Homeric catalogues, about allegory, about Milton and Spenser and Shakespeare and Joyce and Nabokov. Some pages are so ...”

“... for example, to the seductions of the form of conservatism promoted by his LSE colleague Michael Oakeshott, observing tartly that ‘tradition may be elegance, competence, courage, modesty and realism … it is also bullshit, servility, vested interest, arbitrariness, empty ritual.’ Gellner didn’t do ideological enthusiasm, but he was at the same ...”

“... picked from the gardens of Newstead Abbey. ‘Iris Origo, like Byron, was soaked in Italy,’ said Michael Foot, who cited her book as the inspiration for his own writings about the poet. The comment is apposite also for The Merchant of Prato, which is steeped in the landscape and culture of Tuscany as much as in a particular period of its history. Though she ...”

“... looked at my plate and said with annoyance: I do wish you wouldn’t be so fussy about a harmless white sauce.Get on with the story please, I said.You get on with your supper. You can have a choc ice when you’ve finished.I love choc ices.Shaking her head, dropping the spent match into an ashtray. Love isn’t the right word for choc ices. Love is the ...”

“... in Florence is evoked in all its profusion, its ‘odds and ends of ravage’: picture-frames White through the worn gilt, mirror-sconces chipped, Bronze angel-heads once knobs attached to chests, (Handled when ancient dames chose forth brocade) Modern chalk drawings, studies from the nude, Samples of stone, jet, breccia, porphyry Polished and ...”

“... be protected; it doesn’t say that Mao told him to do this. The other source, an article by Michael Schoenhals, says that rather than intervening in persecutions managed by others, Zhou himself managed the main high-level persecutions of the Cultural Revolution. While this supports Chang and Halliday’s point that Zhou was not blameless, it does ...”

“... without ration cards by which they can be identified) while welcoming Michael Jackson. Mumbai, however, is not merely a local name for the city; the renaming was not just an act of official translation but an announcement of a new phase in the city’s history and self-definition. While ‘Bombay’ invoked the world of the ...”