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“... Ossenhooft (the Ox Head).In the Middle Ages, Antwerp had been a quiet regional town, with a small river port and two trade fairs a year. The butchers’ trade was heavily protected and they easily met the demands of the city’s population. But when the Zwin channel silted up around 1500 and Bruges became inaccessible by ship, trade moved east to ...”

“... and, in some ways, disappeared. Like Purified by Fire: A History of Cremation in America by Stephen Prothero (2001), Committed to the Cleansing Flame is a comprehensively researched, thoroughly annotated, impressively appendixed and richly illustrated text. Both books make a titular nod to the central and requisite shift that made the burning of dead ...”

“... smaller details of everyday life, things that are likely to happen between lunch and supper, small passions, restricted emotions, dramas of the reception-room, tragedies of an afternoon call, crises involving cups of tea’. Naturalism, by contrast, emerges when ‘things commence to happen to us, if we kill a man or two, or get mixed up in a tragic ...”

“... came of age working on the newspapers that his father tried and failed to establish in a number of small towns. With only meagre formal schooling, he read widely on his own, taught himself Spanish and German, and began writing poems in the style of Heinrich Heine, a few of which were accepted by the Atlantic. In 1860, he was asked to write a campaign biography ...”

“... for execution. The statues are larger than life-size, with eerie, enlarged, polished onyx eyes and small teeth (real ones). You could walk among the statues, become part of the scene, one of the witnesses, one of the voyeurs, and share in the figures’ perplexity and awe. Pacheco also showed richly coloured, buffed and waxed oil paintings on mythical ...”

“... hears only words of the kind that embarrass Frederic Henry in A Farewell to Arms, the kind that Stephen Dedalus fears in Ulysses. ‘So proud,’ men tell him. ‘So grateful, so honoured. Guardians. Freedoms. Fanatics. TerrRr.’ ‘The war,’ women say, ‘the troops because defending szszszsz among nations szszszsz owl-kay-duzz szszszsz.’ Sometimes ...”

“... of a dozen to do wrong what he does right – and a slew of British directing talent led by Stephen Daldry has brought it to the small screen. The British settings are spectacular, the whole thing like an implosion of David Kynaston, but the main achievement is Morgan’s, in finding ways to show the human side of ...”

“... In the last four years, Trump has fed his supporters a steady diet of racism and aggression. A small selection from this extensive menu would include his Birtherist questioning of Obama’s citizenship; his attack on the family of a Muslim-American soldier killed in action; his praise of those ‘very fine people’ among the Neo-Nazis who marched in ...”

“... and took it in turns to correct his spelling and syntax (both quite dreadful). Gibran produced a small body of writings in Arabic and in English, and managed to be soupily soulful and vaguely prophetic in both languages. He also painted – Robin Waterfield’s biography is good on the recurring features of his art, including its ‘vague ectoplasmic ...”

“... of a number of the pieces of New Science which Regis describes. Take, for example, the work of Stephen Wolfram. An Etonian who published his first paper on particle physics at the age of 15 and got his PhD from Caltech at 20, Wolfram wanted (in Regis’s words) to explain, ‘not the complexity of any given phenomenon, but complexity itself, wherever it ...”

“... even of the vivisectors, forbids vivisection of humans, it is his major concession, not his small-print provisos, that will be noticed. Likewise, in a world eager to treat most non-human animals as things, his condemnation of factory farming, painful slaughter and the slaughter at all of ‘rational and self-conscious beings’ may well be less ...”

“... banking steeply to avoid the pyramidal summit of the Canary Wharf tower, is named in honour of Sir Stephen Redgrave. After hacking through brambles, picking a path around Magellan Boulevard, Atlantis Avenue and a boarded-up missionary hut, I found myself outside the perimeter fence of the steel-grey block of Buhler Sortex Ltd. Two men wearing crisp blue shirts ...”

“... understand – a low wall made of dressed stone, large thin flat slabs, no mortar, but packed with small stones to bind them. Then the remains of a lower wall running up against it, making the corner of a rectangle. I pull away moss and earth, and find a stone-paved floor, the hazel bushes growing up through it. I want it to be a fort or an ancient lookout, in ...”

“... for the lighter but more efficient cane: much relish here in the details. ‘Dick’ moans to Stephen Spender: ‘Even if I become prime minister, I’ll never again be as great as I was at Winchester.’ ‘Dick’ is immortalised by John Betjeman: Broad of Church and Broad of Mind, Broad Before and Broad Behind. ‘Dick’ competes with Auden for the ...”

“... Fanny Osbourne. All this time he had been practising to write. With the encouragement of Leslie Stephen, he had had an essay and article or two published; and during 1878 he published the stories later collected as his New Arabian Nights. In June 1878 Fanny’s husband ordered her to return to America. Louis went on a solitary walking tour in the ...”