“... north lies the lower Isle of May, a mile long. I try to go to the May in May every year, to mark my birthday; a tourist boat sails daily from Anstruther throughout the season. Or ordinarily it does. In 2018, I went not in May but in late April, the week after my father died. Visitors go for the abundance of birds, and the photo opportunities: the cliff ...”

“... landmarks were valued, even worshipped, and people were impelled to carve and erect the liths to mark and celebrate them. We do lift up our eyes unto the hills. We use them to guide our ways by land and sea. We are relieved when the next rise of land comes into sight. Hills are perfect sites for burial grounds, and giant calendars, or to celebrate a solstice ...”

“... History of Women. Alexander was a man of the Enlightenment who regarded politeness to women as a mark of civilisation. Savages and ‘musselmen’ might treat their women as sexual helots, but a gentleman was solicitous of his womenfolk. Whether women deserved such treatment was another matter. Modern European women were commendably good-hearted, always ...”

“... like Henri Yellowwine, of John Murray’s ‘Adventitious Publicity Dept’, or ‘“Ginny” Rose Lee of the Go-Karts and Strip Arts Council’, and anyone else anaesthetised by the poetry biz, not least W.H. Laudanum. But they turn just as sharply on one Conilho Moraes (‘c/o the Poetry Book Society’), whose version has the diabetic prince’s ...”

“... is failure. Success was impossible; the act of resistance was understood to be at the least a mark of defiance, at the most a preparation for some later triumph. We know what the resisters didn’t: that their enemy would be defeated, though this would be an achievement they wouldn’t share. The war wasn’t won by assassinations and victory wasn’t ...”

“... Flying Doctor Service. After his death, his ashes were buried here; a year later it was decided to mark the grave with a large boulder taken from a place known to European Australians as the Devil’s Marbles. To the local Warumungu people this is Karlu Karlu, a sacred women’s site, and the removal of the boulder, without permission, caused considerable ...”

“... the Prayer Book was demonstrated as much in resistance as in compliance. In 1549, the West Country rose in rebellion against the first of Archbishop Cranmer’s new English liturgies, denouncing it as ‘a Christmas game’. Exeter was besieged, troops were sent against the rebels, half of them foreign mercenaries, many lives were lost, and the ...”

“... included 38 staff. In 2014, fewer than 25 staff were included and the department’s GPA rose from 2.4 to 3.1, enough to promote it from twentieth place in the national table to eighth. A bad score can also persuade a university not to bother the next time round: in physics, the number of universities submitting fell from 64 in 1992 to 42 in 2014; in ...”

“... in Maps for Lost Lovers, the crime is the beginning not the end of the story – a bloody mark on the page around which reader and characters painfully circulate, uncertain of what they see. ‘They’ – the murdered lovers – ‘have become a bloody Rorschach blot: different people see different things in what has happened.’ If the charge ...”

“... sending the major into retirement with his life pension as a Free Officer intact. Saddam Hussein rose from a routinely violent milieu in the bandit country round the small town of Takrit and it was as a terrorist and later torturer on behalf of the Ba’ath Party that he made his way up. The Ba’ath Party was an elaborately-structured ideological group ...”

“... justice, but as a problem for the economy itself. ‘Relative equality is good for growth,’ Mark Carney, the governor of the Bank of England, stated last summer. Inequality has re-emerged as a factor in electoral politics too. A recent poll in the US claimed that two-thirds of the population was dissatisfied with the country’s distribution of wealth ...”

“... few decades ago. The island’s trees were cut down for the salt works, and the land has dried up. Mark Kurlansky, who went there, describes meeting elderly salt veterans, Belongers, who recall that with wages of a shilling and sixpence a day for hard labour shifting salt sacks, and with no alternative employment, they might as well have been slaves. It’s ...”

“... of the virtues of The Book History Reader is that it brings such continuities to light, pairing Mark Rose’s densely particularised history of copyright law with Foucault and Barthes on authorship, or Janice Radway’s lovingly detailed reconstruction of the Book-of-the-Month Club’s marketing strategies with Stanley Fish’s aggressively perverse ...”

“... he tested the rare limits of his individual talent. When teams discovered no single player could mark him, they sent two or three or four defenders at him, and he worked out ways between or around or over them, and scored and scored and scored. But his club kept losing in the final stages, against the ‘bad boys’ of Detroit, uglier but more disciplined ...”

“... from you? You see what has been achieved, but it is harder to imagine Velázquez making his mark than it is to imagine Ingres touching in one of his smooth cheeks. Velázquez: The Technique of Genius is an illuminating introduction to what can be learnt from the surface of the pictures. (Both authors have written at length about Velázquez in other ...”