“... Even when we meet with a fact about the artist (and there are a good many new ones here) – it may be about the family timber business, about the artist’s investments in land, about his endless pursuit of benefices for his unworthy son Pomponio or of emoluments for himself – we seem to be considering commonplace behaviour rather than anything ...”

“... yet the scope of the project, its distance from anything that might be described as parochial, may persuade them that the records of Christianity, preserved and interpreted for the most part by assiduous priests and scholars, deserve a few moments of their attention. Consider, as one instance among a thousand (I’ll come back to them), the decisions or ...”

“... around 400 ad by holy men, like bishops, then by other categories, including those kings who may or may not have been saintly. Louis IX of France was the first major king to be made a saint. His reign, from 1226 to 1270, forms the middle episode in an unbroken success story for the French monarchy, a story which had ...”

“... the other west, and the relief prominently features Greeks shaking hands with Persians. Samosata may have been an Aramaic-speaking town, even in Lucian’s time. An antagonist in his dialogue Twice Accused claims that when he began his training he was ‘barbarian in speech, and all but wearing a jacket in the Syrian style’. ‘Barbarian speech’ ...”

“... doesn’t seem too bold to suggest that the book isn’t deeply concerned with moral problems, and may not be aspiring to depth in the first place. (This is not the same as calling it shallow.) It sets out, though with no announcement of the fact, to open up a particular sort of imaginative, even imaginary space, though there are McEwan themes that seem to ...”

“... hit in Russia, where it won two literary prizes, and in Germany. One explanation for this may be that the reading public has a greater appetite for experimental fiction than the cynics believe. Another may be the nature of Shishkin’s experiment, which relates to the enclosure, rather than to the entirety of its ...”

“... of stage props?’ Then he adds, a little sadly: ‘The only difference is that our predecessors may have truly believed. I cannot believe; I know too much.’ This confession gets at a major problem faced by contemporary doctors. The more effective their medical technology, the less faith they have in the power of their office. Doctors have come to believe ...”

“... and had a special class of men trained up to do just that. Present-day America has not, and this may account for some of the undoubted blunders in postwar Iraq. Lord Cromer, born Evelyn Baring, came from that class. With Lords Curzon and Milner, he was one of the trio of great imperial proconsuls in late Victorian and Edwardian Britain. He has always seemed ...”

“... in three languages. Then, suddenly, she turned her back on dancing and began to manifest what may have been symptoms of mental illness. Why Lucia gave up dancing is not clear, and Shloss refrains from rushing to judgment. She may have had an abortion which injured her health, or the jealous Nora ...”

“... refer to repeated attempts to fit its imagery to new circumstances. Several imply that, while they may have left the statue in place, the Flavian dynasty made efforts to remove its Neronian associations (perhaps changing Nero’s facial features to be more unambiguously those of the Sun God; although some people, we are told, detected a resemblance to the ...”

“... a North Korean diplomat at the UN, warned of ‘a dangerous situation in which a thermonuclear war may break out at any moment’. A few days later, President Trump told Reuters that ‘we could end up having a major, major conflict with North Korea.’ American atmospheric scientists have shown that even a relatively contained nuclear war would throw up ...”

“... the loss of Mongolia. The United States approached its current mainland form in the 1880s. This may be an age of states, but some of them are so big that global politics is for the most part still a game for subcontinental powers. Size, of course, is not a virtue in itself, and very large states have their own problems. Plato thought the ideal state would ...”

“... Normandy with a dream of being brave, a smart looker on his arm. Rewatching these films today, we may wonder how aware Bogart and Bacall were of what they were up to. Call it art or propaganda – but for a time the two of them fell for it, as if they were watching their own movie. The best film stars are so often their first audiences. So it was with these ...”

“... or so a new Armed Forces Act comes before Parliament, the most recent having passed into law in May 2001. These Bills are minutely examined in both the Commons and the Lords: such legislation is invariably scrutinised by a select committee specially appointed for the purpose, and the 39 clauses and seven schedules of the 2001 Bill were also the subject of ...”

“... they had fought between 1914 and 1918. The 66,000 casualties that the BEF would suffer between 10 May and 25 June were a measure of their disastrous failure to grasp what it was that they were facing.No doubt the bridge four steadily improved their game as they got to know one another’s bidding habits and foibles. Monica Sandison wrote at least two letters ...”