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“... solid rather than soft ... He is remarkably fit for a man of 60, which is what he became last Jan 31. Time on Norman Mailer, April 1983 His hair showed the silver of a virile maturity, while the lines on his face had not yet become a myriad of wrinkles, terraces and webs, but exhibited, instead, that look of character supported by triumph which comes ...”

“... which begins a process that is encoded in subsequent habits, institutions and modes of thought. Jan Kociumbas’s general history of the Australian colonies begins with the flogging of three female convicts: while allowing that this was not part of any ‘formal plan’ of colonisation, she believes the event indicates the assumptions about property and ...”

“... denoted conspicuous culinary consumption – they were lavished on food and drink as an olfactory mark of opulence. Everyone knew how expensive they were, and the more evident spices were in the food you gave your guests, the more social capital you acquired. Spicy food smelt of success. But there is another sort of story to be told about the spice trade, and ...”

“... I was not able to get to the major exhibition organised by the city of Bruges to mark the 500th anniversary of the death of Hans Memling. But there is consolation in the fact that if one has ever been to Bruges one knows something of what his art is like. To a remarkable degree Memling has come to be identified with this city, whose centre is a preserve out of time ...”

“... Heydrich, one of the architects of the Holocaust, by two Czech special agents, Jozef Gabčik and Jan Kubiš, their subsequent deaths and the terrible retaliation enacted by the Nazis on the Czech people, which culminated in the massacre of all the inhabitants of the villages of Lidice and Ležáky. The first difficulty the reader runs up against is the ...”

“... served in the Habsburg army; the vast majority did not desert. One of them, oddly enough, was Jan Masaryk, son of the exiled T.G., who defended the Dual Monarchy to the bitter end and was even decorated for it. In spite of all this, Benes and Masaryk senior persuaded the Allies in August 1918 to recognise Czechoslovakia as a ‘belligerent ...”

“... of 1941. In July 1941, Poles in Jedwabne murdered Jews in a day-long pogrom, as we know from Jan Gross’s book Neighbours, published in 2001. Since then, Polish researchers have located 23 other towns where Poles massacred Jews. Ignoring this research and citing no sources, Davies claims that ‘the number of reports about massacres with a similar ...”

“... it to the ghetto leaders, who thus were told by 28 July. The extraordinary Polish beau sabreur, Jan Karski, even smuggled himself into a death-camp, and escaped to London to tell his story – not that, for some time, he was believed. There were even some Germans (notably, Kurt Gerstein, who was entrusted with delivering the prussic acid to the SS ...”

“... The next antagonist, in a third lecture called ‘Shakespeare in the Directors’ Theatre’, is Jan Kott, author of Shakespeare our Contemporary, whose ‘dreary absurdities and solemn nonsense’ are however assailed, reasonably enough, in the persons of directors like Peter Brook and John Barton whose productions are determined by Kott’s or some ...”

“... analysis of Vertigo, Wood draws attention to sequences of shots in the first hour of the film that mark a narrative threshold: a step-change in its relation to its audience. During these moments, our eyes and ears are ‘co-opted’ for the ‘sense of the world’ somewhat precariously maintained by the agoraphobic private detective Scottie Ferguson (James ...”

“... for five hours at 40 kph. The slightly bulkier sylph in pink is Armstrong’s long-time rival, Jan Ullrich. His Tour is now practically over. With only five stages and 600 kilometres to go, a gap of 6 minutes 45 seconds is too big to be bridged. Ullrich turns his bike, spits, and heads for the team bus. In the time it takes to give an interview and a blood ...”

“... Centre, the Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen in Vienna, the Soros Foundation and the Jan Hus Foundation, but their most distinctive feature has been a virtual absence of central co-ordination. They have relied on a network of intellectuals – many of the British ones from Oxford, and many of them philosophers – who have taken small ...”

“... does not seem to permit a study of the Florentine palace of the Renaissance along the lines of Mark Girouard’s Life in the English Country House. However, Goldthwaite has put his finger on an important problem, all the more important because the example of the Florentines was followed all over Italy in the 16th and 17th centuries. In Genoa, for ...”

“... is as little mystery about the Grand Canal as about our local thoroughfare, and the name of St Mark is as familiar as the postman’s ring. The postman always rings twice, and there is much mystery in McEwan. The name of St Mark does not ring once, despite his elaborated descriptions of ‘one of the great tourist ...”

“... development. Unsurprisingly in the Europe of those times the book appears to have made no mark; and Torday’s employers in the Leopoldian Congo Free State, then about to become the Belgian Congo colony, were men of solidly commercial good sense. They must have thought the claim absurd in so far as they may have noticed it, and after them the colonial ...”