“... veterinarians and iron skillets. Over a hundred years ago, the North Country was the last stepping stone to the fulfilment of America’s manifest destiny. Vietnam turned the Great American Dream of the 19th century into the Great American Scheme, leaving Montana and Idaho to be possibly the most provocative critical presences in the American conscience, a ...”

“... alien, but Gumilev is at home with them: his stars hang low. In translation, and particularly in Richard McKane’s (the second book-length selection to be published in English), Gumilev’s language can sound sadly clumsy as well as strange. Gumilev would never have allowed his unicorns to ‘prance’: the Russian is neutral, carrying no other sense than ...”

“... luxury [that] played to every Western European stereotype … about the decadent Orient’, as Richard Miles puts it in his impressive new history of Carthage. Pointing out that Rome’s triumph over Carthage ‘provided an attractive blueprint’ and ‘metaphor’ to justify French domination in North Africa, Miles dismisses Salammbô as ‘the most ...”

“... out in a group of ambitious black male writers who came of age in the 1930s and 1940s and included Richard Wright (born 1908), Ralph Ellison (1914) and James Baldwin (1924), Himes has never quite entered the pantheon. His peers were condescending: Wright never took him seriously as an artist; Ellison, who saw him as little more than an ex-con with a pen, joked ...”

“... Biographia Literaria, which he subtitled Biographical Sketches of My Literary Life and Opinions. Richard Holmes, by reputation anyway, is different; and certainly his magnificent life of Shelley makes time, in the course of unravelling the threads of Shelley’s emotional, intellectual and imaginative life, to introduce its readers to writings that most of ...”

“... on tomb sculpture, ‘the static intermediary between the earthly and the eternal’, where the stone figure of the Commendatore is undeniably a case in point. Peter Gay explores the opera’s ‘hidden agenda’, long ago exposed to the light of Freudian day: in this Oedipal reading, Mozart’s ‘unconscious rage against his father, disciplinarian and ...”

“... culture it is pregnant with easy excitement, and Hill conjures with it as with the philosopher’s stone, thus gilding his cloudily ambitious claims. But discussion of the intellectual influence of 1640-60 depends on the character that is assigned to the period. Despite the frequent use of the word ‘revolution’ by Hill and some others, it is actually a ...”

“... from all quarters to see the low-rise city from an impossible angle. In place of the 25,500 stone blocks of Kim’s tower – one for every day of the first seventy years of his life – the Shard is encased in 11,000 high-tech low-iron glass panels: if we’re into decoding buildings, could this be one for each of the 11,000 military personnel at the ...”

“... to the casual eye like just another part of Trafalgar Square, all Corinthian columns and Portland stone. ABK never recovered, and neither did the sort of modern architecture – committed to social change and uncompromising design – that the Ahrends family devoted their lives to. This intriguing, rather unprofessional account will be easily lost among the ...”

“... of St Mary, which stands in the centre of the village opposite the green. Small and built of local stone, its oddness dawns only slowly. The use of the Lombardic style – which Pevsner noted as ‘original’ for the early 1840s – may not strike the non-specialist as particularly remarkable, but a large ...”

“... and brothers’. Most were written by established names, among them Frank Conroy, Stuart Dybeck, Richard Ford, Joyce Carol Oates, Robert Stone and Amy Tan. Those writers known partly for formal experimentation whose work Wolff did include (among them Lorrie Moore, Denis Johnson and Mary Robison) did not, in the stories ...”

“... it, you might find that the work of these painters has, if not rigour, its own sort of integrity. Richard Morphet’s catalogue essay speaks with a fine generosity about the slow, steady, affirmative qualities of their later painting. This sort of pleading won’t settle the issue, however. The exhibition in question was just too big: ‘pleasure’, whatever ...”

“... private palazzi were built – ‘palatial’ by virtue of their size and of their grandiose stone façades. Palazzo Strozzi is a spectacular surviving example. There was no practical need for houses built on this scale, enclosing vast private spaces, underfurnished by later standards, in which the owner’s immediate family, together with a handful of ...”

“... to know why the inhabitants of a dying town could only discuss their problems in a cloud of smoke. Richard Klein, Professor of French at Cornell, could supply Mrs Willis with a number of answers, one of them being that, in wartime, smoking keeps up ‘courage and endurance in the face of intolerably stressful circumstances’, not only because of its ...”

“... situation of 1930s Germany, with the architect modelling the relationship of ‘Hans Pfitzner or Richard Strauss, or Furtwängler, or Paul Hindemith to a patron resembling Goebbels’. He suggests that Prince’s early poetic experiments were ‘influenced by the styles of political, economic and literary criticism as these were presented – or, as some ...”