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“... In March​ 1684, a prince from the African kingdom of Ndongo arrived in Rome. Lourenço da Silva de Mendonça was there, as José Lingna Nafafé explains in his new book, to demand the legal abolition of Atlantic slavery. He was bringing ‘an ethical and criminal kufunda [case] before the Vatican court, which accused the nations involved’ – including the Vatican, Italy, Spain and Portugal – of ‘crimes against humanity ...”

“... For centuries, the region that now straddles northern Angola and the western part of the Democratic Republic of Congo formed a political and cultural whole. South of what the BaKongo knew as the Zaire river lay the heartland of the Kingdom of Kongo, one of the most powerful states of West-Central Africa. Kongo sat at the crossroads of trade routes linking the forests of the interior with the arid coastal areas near Luanda, in Angola, and the savannahs of the plateau further north ...”

“... Rachel Clarke points out that in the last twenty years there have been seventeen white papers, green papers and reviews of funding concerning social care, but no actual change. Social care wasn’t a disaster waiting to happen, it was a disaster that was already happening, in slow motion and full public view; but the only people who noticed or cared were ...”

“... a name exotic or absurd, half old-time Jewish and half Hollywood – Shenandoah Fish, Hershey Green, Cornelius Schmidt. In his best verse play, Shenandoah, he even features himself looking back on his own naming ceremony twenty-five years earlier. When his mother, Elsie Fish, decides on Shenandoah, he breaks out Macbeth-like: Now it is done and quickly ...”

“... sooner or later to ‘Africa’s forgotten war’. The conflict in Western Sahara, the subject of Toby Shelley’s book, was often referred to as a forgotten war. It also displaced a large number of the territory’s inhabitants, whose camps are in no sense makeshift: the Sahrawi refugees from former Spanish Sahara have been stranded across the border in ...”

“... and blinked. It was a ruckus.’ And the particulars matter in the death of a particular small green frog: He was exactly half in and half out of the water, looking like a schematic diagram of an amphibian, and he didn’t jump. He didn’t jump; I crept closer. At last I knelt on the island’s winterkilled grass, lost, dumbstruck, staring at the frog ...”

“... rather than fantasy, but also by the quality of understatement. From Compton-Burnett to Hartley to Green and Greene and Powell, novelists have felt that the climactic points of a book may be more effective if they occur offstage, or even if they are left unsaid. There are exceptions, Angus Wilson’s novels most notable among them, but this remains the ...”

“... the ‘coast of Bohemia’ – secures the play as a (kind of) comedy.These are all versions of ‘green world’ plays, in which, as Northrop Frye pointed out in the 1950s, ‘the action of the comedy begins in a world represented as a real world, moves into a green world, goes into a metamorphosis there in which the comic ...”

“... iconic assassin, iconic baby lotion and so on and on – iconic terrorist, iconic toaster, iconic Toby jug … They anticipate John Grindrod’s Weltanschauung. There is very little he sees that can’t have ‘iconic’ attached to it. As he wanders through the places created in the nearly five decades since Thatcher decreed the right to buy he finds the ...”

“... she eats for lunch, with a glass of dry Vouvray, from ‘a faience dish the colour of a wet green frog’. And the lustre, at least in some lights, of the 49 pearls on her necklace – ‘the pitted pearl, the slightly ovoid pearl and the biggest pearl’, the ‘matchless shade’ of which ‘stood out’.In the reader’s first glimpse of him, Chéri ...”

“... promoting adaptive change is pure functionalism. In her excellent 1987 account of the debate, Toby Appel argues that both protagonists ‘defended extreme positions’. As so often in scientific disputes, the truth lay somewhere in the middle; and so, Appel points out, the debate’s significance lay in its challenge to ‘naturalists to come to a ...”

“... a knowledge of five languages, was educated at Charles Morton’s Dissenting Academy in Newington Green. Morton was a distinguished teacher and educationalist who was incessantly harassed by the Anglican Church till he left England for North America, where he became Vice-President of Harvard. The American connection can be sensed in Crusoe, and it is wittily ...”

“... seclusion in a bedroom in Wimpole Street.’ Woolf’s mother died when she was 12; her brother Toby died of typhoid on a visit to Greece; her health repeatedly broke down; and, although the tyranny was of a different kind, any reader of Stephen’s Mausoleum Book and of Woolf’s own accounts will recognise the tyrannical tenderness of the ...”

“... William MacAskill, a 28-year-old lecturer at Oxford. As graduate students MacAskill and his friend Toby Ord committed themselves to donate most of their future earnings to charity (in MacAskill’s case anything above £20,000, in Ord’s £18,000), and set themselves the task of figuring out how to make best use of the money they had pledged. The result was ...”

“... to NHS England, the master of Leicestershire’s STP is a long-term NHS administrator called Toby Sanders, who’s also managing director of West Leicestershire CCG. But when I approached Sanders in August, I got nowhere: initially a flat refusal, through an intermediary, to have anyone talk to me about anything to do with Leicestershire NHS, then months ...”