“... writer had learnt and intuited from having daughters of her own. It also has a Jamesian narrator, Paul Manning, an apprentice railway engineer who possesses a feminine power of observation (he notes as odd that his cousin Phillis Holman, although a grown woman, still has the childish habit of wearing a pinafore over her dress). Gaskell’s eye for the ...”

“... by the German Hans Habe (who had returned from exile in America) and the American William Gardner Smith. Both books portray affairs between black GIs and white German women that are ultimately doomed because of the attitude of the American army. Smith’s hero finds it odd that ‘in the land of hate, I should find this one ...”

“... Even Pindar, Horace and Ovid threw down the gauntlet to oblivion: come and get me if you can. Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts are poets and professors of poetry, and the authors of a previous collaboration, Edgelands, which took as its subject the dejected spaces that buffer suburban developments, industrial parks, highways and airports. They have ...”

“... Aristide’s departure was at best facilitated, at worst coerced by the US and France,’ Gayle Smith, a member of the National Security Council staff under Clinton, recently said. Why such animus towards Haiti’s leader? Taking up the question of the historic French debt, Aristide declared that France ‘extorted this money from Haiti by force and ...”

“... Strange characters began to haunt Lee’s poolside. Among the strangest was a man called Peter Paul, a former lawyer with several felony convictions – he couldn’t defend himself without exposing his clandestine anti-communist activities, he explained – who had reinvented himself as the manager of the male model known as Fabio. In 1998, Lee went into ...”

“... the pattern we are presented with in the book corresponds to the three literary phases that Paul Van Tieghem has distinguished: a first one, starting around 1730, in which a gradual rise of interest in mountains can be detected; a second, arriving around 1760, marked by a more pronounced admiration for the lower, more pastoral slopes; and a third, from ...”

“... abridgment of his 12-volume History of Greece, prefaced with an illuminating new introduction by Paul Cartledge, provides the best chance that there is likely to be of bringing him to a modern readership. He is one of those Victorians with an astonishing range and energy. Though he got a solid classical grounding at Sevenoaks Grammar School and ...”

“... for the murder weapon (‘As this catalogue goes to press, the .40 ESP has testfired over 37,000 Smith & Wesson rounds without malfunction’), the central character’s hospital records and a tabloid report of the crime make their way into the early pages of the novel. The reader is expected to fit together the pieces of the puzzle. deadkidsongs ...”

“... which claim to speak directly of the times we live in. ‘The Watering Place’ after Peter Paul Rubens by John Browne (1770) There is, however, nothing irrelevant about the new show at the Royal Academy, featuring Gainsborough, Constable and Turner; not because of anything it has to say about ‘the making of landscape’, but because it is so ...”

“... No one seems to be missing. And there’s no shortage of ambient sound. Songs collected by Harry Smith for the Anthology of American Folk Music (1952) drift on the air in the first rooms; in the last, we can hear Paul Bowles’s recordings (1959-61) of traditional Moroccan musicians. Beaubourg’s trophy exhibit is ...”

“... to be the legitimate descendant of the Roman imperium. Charles may never, as he wearily told Pope Paul III in 1536, have had any ambition to be the master of the universe – dominus totius orbis – as which his advisors and panegyrists had so often portrayed him. But he certainly aimed at keeping his scattered domains as one polity, with one ruler, one ...”

“... applied art and romantic landscape, and of what now looks like late Post-Impressionism – Matthew Smith, Duncan Grant, Frances Hodgkins, Victor Pasmore – there were more eccentric talents of various sizes, like Stanley Spencer and David Jones, who were very English (or very Welsh) and not international at all. In drawings of wrapped sculpture in landscape ...”

“... unpopular opposition leader on record, polling worse than Michael Foot, William Hague, Iain Duncan Smith, Michael Howard and Ed Miliband, all of whom went on to lose general elections by significant margins, or did not get to contest them. There are 230 Labour MPs; on 28 June, 172 of them voted in favour of a no confidence motion in Corbyn, and only forty ...”

“... even imperfect FRT can be useful. Suppose you have just photographed a man who claims to be John Smith. How can a computer establish whether he is the same John Smith who exists in your database? First, it needs to find the man’s face in the picture – by looking for blob-like regions with consistent brightness and ...”