“... It’s a Knockout, in which ephebes aged under 20 tried to steal cheeses from an altar guarded by young men aged 20 or over. A priestess stood by, holding a little wooden image of the goddess, who was identified with savage Artemis. If the whipping was too restrained and not enough blood was spattering her altar, Artemis would grow impossibly heavy until the ...”

“... one that washes over you when you see flights advertised for 99p: something just isn’t right. Robert Greenwald’s documentary Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price makes a strong argument about what exactly is not right. It boils down to the question of just how Wal-Mart achieves its control of costs – a word which, in a business context, to a large ...”

“... had been, handing out large sums at unpredictable moments (for example, to his old wartime friend Robert Graves, but only after they had ceased to be real friends).Sassoon was a great self-fashioner. He was also intensely self-aware, open-hearted (though capable of mean-spiritedness), restless, prickly, brave, idealistic, never content, eternally tussling ...”

“... Iwo Jima campaign, Flags of Our Fathers (2006). An old man is remembering his participation as a young marine in raising the Stars and Stripes on top of Mount Suribachi, a moment immortalised in another famous photograph, taken by Joe Rosenthal, perhaps the most reproduced photograph in American history. Late in his life, though, it is not Rosenthal’s 1945 ...”

“... case of the officer class, sheltered believers in empire, deference and loyalty. Second Lieutenant Robert Darley, gazetted in the Royal Regiment of Artillery on 10 February 1915, followed in his father’s footsteps. Born in 1859, George saw action in the Boer War. As a teenager I’d occasionally hazarded what the daily familiarity with death and fearful ...”

“... wages they earn, the debts they face and the opportunities their children will or won’t have. Robert Putnam’s Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis is even more closely attentive to the changes that economic and social transformation have forced on families, schools and communities.3 Putnam presents a series of case studies of parents and their ...”

“... to see Trump, wanted her $500 back. The loudest of the hecklers was Paul Anderson, a red-headed young man in sunglasses, shorts and a MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN baseball cap. He was holding a TRUMP/PENCE sign with HILLARY IS A CRIMINAL written on the reverse. He was surrounded by television reporters, and over the weekend he would become a minor national ...”

“... crow into national bard; there were theoreticians of ‘original composition’ like Edward Young, who set a premium on the rejection of classical models; there were book-trade entrepreneurs whose huge poetry anthologies cashed in on the landmark case of Donaldson v. Becket, which more or less destroyed copyright law; there were the pioneering academics ...”

“... High’s Latinate period, which – though the school was an ancient foundation and claimed Robert Henryson, the ‘Scottish Chaucer’, among its early masters – occurred circa 1935. The headmaster, whom I encountered face to face only once, had MA Cantab after his name and wore a black cloak that, though every teacher had one, gave him an especially ...”

“... years after Michelangelo. Aged about twenty, Sebastiano became attracted by the work of another young local artist, Giorgione. Almost everything associated with Giorgione is now a matter of controversy, but there is general agreement about the identification of most of Sebastiano’s surviving pictures from his time in Venice. These are well represented in ...”

“... of her counsellors are kept, and where readers are greeted by a 19th-century statue of the svelte young empress, are filled with reports annotated in her hand. Few matters were beneath her notice, from which bed to put in an archduke’s bedroom to the precise wording of clauses in international treaties. She could be pragmatic. Although she campaigned ...”

“... Josef Frolik, a Czechoslovak defector, who said Owen was on a £500 monthly retainer organised by Robert Husak, another intelligence officer at the Czechoslovak embassy in London. Owen, Frolik said, had been passing secrets to the Czechoslovaks since 1954. During his trial at the Old Bailey, Owen acknowledged receiving money but denied that he had given away ...”

“... receptive to fundamentalist Christianity, and (if the recent Soviet invitation to televangelist Robert Schuller is anything to go by) the satellite channels of a united Europe may one day broadcast the gospel of individual salvation which its inhabitants have long thought fit only for their American cousins. It is worth remembering that the social evolution ...”

“... of ‘one life, one writing’, although not at all in the proudly psychopathic sense in which Robert Lowell threw off that phrase. Few writers can have been less disturbed in the psyche than Mrs Gaskell, and the fact suggests the uncomfortable old cliché that virtue and good writing hardly ever go together. With her heart in the right place she wrote ...”

“... Bergamasque, 1890; Images oubliées, 1894) are promising but generally conventional, while the young Ravel was cultivating a Satie-like modal delicacy (Menuet antique, 1895; Pavane pour une Infante défunte, 1899).’ Fauré, moreover, can be found – so Nectoux (backed by Françoise Gervais) suggests – exploring ‘new scales and occasionally Hindu ...”