“... of the Balkans’. He is in a Bulgarian café as it explodes with joy at the news that King Alexander of Yugoslavia has been assassinated, and in Ruse entertains his landlady by singing a Marlene Dietrich song backwards (he is English, after all). And one night, south of Varna, he falls off the rocks into the sea and recovers in a cave full of ...”

“... was ascribed to Satan. In the first systematic treatise devoted to the topic, published in 1637, John Sym, a Puritan, was still able to attribute suicide to ‘the strong impulse, powerfull motions, and command of the Devill’. But natural causes were increasingly being blamed: melancholy, a dysfunction of the hypochondriac organs, folly, a foul ...”

“... gave rise to a sense of a much broader Phoenician Mediterranean. Melqart, whose name means ‘king of the city’, is said to have been introduced to Tyre in the tenth century bc, but his cult spread widely. Like Hercules, with whom he was later identified, he was a wandering hero, credited with founding many cities. If the tophet cult divides, Melqart ...”

“... a tribune’s sister (Clodia Metelli), an emperor’s mother-in-law (Faustina I), a king’s daughter (Arsinoe) and, with some double counting, no fewer than eight politicians’ wives. Galla Placidia, the last empress of the western Roman Empire, was the daughter of one emperor, mother of another, aunt of a third, sister of two more and married ...”

“... which appeared in early 1959 only two months after the Hanover show, the artist and critic John McHale alludes to Rudolf Arnheim, who first applied Gestalt theory to art, and cites Paul Schilder on the ‘fragmentary associations’ that we fold into our body images. Similar reflections on the infantile development of the corporeal imago had been made ...”

“... in The Memory of War and in the sometimes, I thought, jejune poems of his collaboration with John Fuller, Partingtime Hall. The novelty in Manila Envelope is that nonsense and ‘light verse’ are yoked to the most harrowing material, and more rigorously than in Auden’s ‘Miss Gee’, for instance, which might otherwise seem a model, because the ...”

“... write. On 2 September 1885 Londoners woke to find their city plastered with posters announcing ‘King Solomon’s Mines – The Most Amazing Story Ever Written.’ Cassell had organised a splendid hype. Haggard wrote two other bestsellers within a year. Then came She, filling the minds of men with that wonderful fifth-formers’ vision of an unbearably ...”

“... Literature’, and log every instance, all the way from D.H. Lawrence and Anna Wickham through John Betjeman to Martin Amis, of one single placename’s use to connote a vast tundra of anodyne, apathetic anonymity. Here, though, Croydon is exactly where you’d expect Lodge to make his couple come from: a prompt for often disappointingly chummy humour at ...”

“... Auden had gone to Berlin to study soon after he left Oxford. There he met the anthropologist John Layard, who showed him the Magnus Hirschfeld Institute for Sexual Science. Auden also discovered the gay bars of Berlin. Through Layard he became acquainted with the revolutionary teachings of the American psychologist Homer Lane. Auden invited his friend ...”

“... as much of the medieval Alexander, the fictional hero of romantic tradition, as of the ancient King of Macedon. At the moment of his discovery, the impact of America was absorbed in layers of his own reading and made to fit his capacious image of himself. Like the artist who showed Cortés riding into Mexico on an elephant, he accommodated his vision of ...”

“... heavily on such Western travellers to Mecca as Ludovico de Varthema, Domingo Badia y Leblich, John Lewis Burckhardt and Richard Burton. While most Western reports pretended to be objective, in some cases this was a pretence only, and Peters would have been better advised to have treated Varthema’s 16th-century Itinerario as a novel about oriental ...”

“... on an unprecedented scale is vividly illustrated in The Great Purges, which contains some of David King’s collection of contemporary photographs, together with a commentary by Isaac Deutscher: ‘In presenting these scenes, I had to reconstruct a nightmare.’ We must hope that, for a majority or Russians, their dreams have become pleasanter: but we do well ...”

“... the same time, it is controversial, for, to revert for a moment to the Stuarts, Dr Morgan has his King Charles’s head. He has returned from his investigations with an enthusiasm for the Coalition which bubbles through all his critical reservations. The standard view of the Lloyd George Government is that it was founded on pure expediency, and its ...”

“... strife under Vichy and the Nazi occupation, have come from transatlantic scholars such as John C. Cairns, Philip Bankwitz, Telford Taylor and Robert O. Paxton. Eleanor M. Gates might modestly disclaim inclusion in such distinguished company. But she has produced a splendid book which is both instructive and moving. She is not much interested in the ...”

“... Then we found out what the modernists were rebelling against.’ Eugenides studied at Brown with John Hawkes and at Stanford with Gilbert Sorrentino, exacting experimentalists who were ‘against order on the whole and against storytelling’. By setting much of his new novel at Brown in the early 1980s, Eugenides returns to the time of the fall; by ...”