“... the Austrian village of Willendorf. Tiny yet massive, the figure’s fullness seems sculptural more or less by definition; its display of observation and exaggeration is so expert that, seen in the flesh, it’s a shock to realise how comfortably the carved stone could fit in your hand. Yet its talismanic immediacy makes it seem the embodiment of the ...”

“... defendants, including Diendéré and Compaoré, were indicted in connection with the murder of Thomas Sankara, Compaoré’s predecessor, in 1987. That trial has been suspended until 1 March, but the prosecution is seeking a thirty-year sentence for Compaoré, accusing him of ‘harming state security’, ‘concealment of corpses’ and ‘complicity in ...”

“... and would like something to counterbalance this. I would like to read about St Francis and St Thomas Aquinas,’ he wrote in his early twenties. He showed an early talent for art, and was sent to the Slade through the benevolence of a local Lady Bountiful. He emerged from it in 1912, an almost dwarfish figure a couple of inches over five feet and weighing ...”

“... kind of work to her. Kumin remembered how Sexton would ‘willingly push a poem through twenty or more drafts’. Beginning with simple couplets and quatrains, she rapidly moved through a series of experiments with poetic forms, including acrostics and villanelles. Never much of a student or serious reader, Sexton knew little ...”

“... of this book, Daniel Grader, sees Macrone as hailing from Scotland, on the say-so of the poet Thomas Moore; others favour the Isle of Man. Hogg met him when he was working as a shopman in Mayfair, and was then published by Macrone when Macrone went into partnership with James Cochrane in Pall Mall. Hogg came to like the two men, together with Cochrane’s ...”

“... Journal of Aesthetics. Part of the theory is derived, unacknowledged, from Saussure, but with the more celebrated, if debatable parts of the Saussurean scheme, such as the arbitrary nature and binary structure of the Saussurean sign, left out. Martin borrows from the psychologist Ulric Neisser a use of the term ‘icon’ which is quite different from that ...”

“... wigs have been largely but not wholly abandoned. Canada dropped them long ago, New Zealand more recently. In Australia’s modern federal court they were initially worn, then abandoned; but in its state supreme courts the full English regalia are still worn. American judges were long ago steered away from wigs by ...”

“... had never been much of a student (he lied about his college degree), but he pored over Thomas Jefferson’s original rules for the House of Representatives:Reading through my three-inch-thick, hardback copy, I came across a line that said that ‘privileged motions’ could be brought to the floor at any time, by any member. It didn’t matter how ...”

“... could sweeten their tea with sugar in preference to honey? How many hundreds of thousands more Africans would have had to be heaped onto the scales to weigh more heavily with Pitt than the death of a single European? How many lives of ordinary people would weigh more than the life ...”

“... Samuel Johnson, Joshua Reynolds, David Garrick, Edmund Burke, Pasquale Paoli, Charles Burney, Thomas Warton and Oliver Goldsmith. Their names appear below the image, cursively engraved, appositely placed: one might almost be looking at a signed group photograph of 18th-century luminaries. In fact the picture is Victorian, painted in about 1845, but the ...”

“... but as Elizabeth King and David Todd detail, the supposed origin of the machine is supported more by circumstantial evidence than positive proof; it’s an ‘elegant hypothesis’, the authors conclude. More interesting than the clockwork Diego’s uncertain provenance, however, is the tantalising concept of ...”

“... avoiding everything about it that was not ‘meaning’. Pushkin’s solution was plainer, opener, more sybilline and yet more emphatic. He would take matters to the point at which the reader could take over. Above all, he would have no facile, sentimental or melodramatic endings, no suicides for love or honour, no stock ...”

“... novel, Goodbye Columbus. He has written eight others since. Admirers will want at least as many more, but in the new novel he seems to be suggesting that he has already offered them the makings of a whole career. He may even be giving an intimation of reduced activity in the future, of a last period already reached. The trouble with trying to think of ...”

“... historians and social anthropologists were quite minimal: this makes the subsequent change all the more remarkable. In 1966 a conference of social anthropologists held in Edinburgh was devoted to the theme of ‘History and Social Anthropology’; the Proceedings contain contributions by six anthropologists and two historians. The anthropologists refer only to ...”

“... scratching that accounts for the monkey’s having it.) The worry about consciousness is that, in Thomas Nagel’s resonant phrase, there is ‘something that it’s like’ to be a conscious creature, but there is, presumably, nothing that it’s like to be a tree; and there is surely nothing that it’s like to be a rock or anything else that is ...”