“... to act without full or explicit orders and been praised for not ‘going by the book’. This may have allowed field commanders ‘to be creative’, but it also distorted the relationship between the army and the political leadership of the state. The example of the Golan Heights, occupied although Dayan and the government had decided not to do so, is ...”

“... all, I do not see this. There are events, I speak of them, if I am to speak then it is these, if I may speak.’ This is the characteristically opaque ‘English’ idiom of Translated Accounts. Although the novel is written in English, it is not the English of native speakers: the 54 ‘accounts’ that make up the book are presented in the preface as having ...”

“... Party’s deputy chairman. Then the second disaster: he offers £2000 to a prostitute so that she may go abroad. The deal takes place at Victoria Station, where Archer’s proxy meets the prostitute, who is in league with the News of the World. The story breaks. Archer resigns as deputy chairman, but sues another tabloid, the Daily Star, for libel. The ...”

“... expected to find one. But there were ten: one succinct W.H.D. Rouse prose translation and one Robert Graves, in prose and song, both in paperback; two blank verse Robert Fagles in solid covers; one rhythmic Richmond Lattimore with a lengthy new introduction;* and three hardback copies of the new Stephen Mitchell ...”

“... mind our journeys were filled with endings, along with the perhaps concluding notion that nature may be larger than memory. The hills of the Scottish Borders seemed to say so, as did the trees around Abergavenny and the stones of the Aran Islands.It was about seven in the morning when we set out. Karl opened his door in Chelsea and I stepped inside the house ...”

“... and intermingled. Wiltshire rightly devotes close attention to the poem ‘On the Death of Dr Robert Levet’ (in Johnson’s posthumously published Works ‘Dr’ was downgraded to ‘Mr’), first printed in the Gentleman’s Magazine in 1783. In the lines ‘Nor, lettere’d arrogance, deny/Thy praise to merit unrefin’d’ it is hard not to see an ...”

“... and subversion in Harriot’s text’ will give us a fuller understanding of Henry IV. An example may serve to show how Greenblatt’s approach works. One of his essays, to my mind the most successful in the whole collection, deals with ‘Shakespeare and the Exorcists’. At the end of Elizabeth’s reign the Anglican clergyman Samuel Harsnett, chaplain to ...”

“... the material that came out of Wales and Ireland, farms and fishing, men’s work with horses. Like Robert Roberts, another recorder of the lives of the poor born at the end of the last century, Evans grew up in a grocer’s shop – not in the classic slum of Salford, but in the mining valley of Abercynon. The children of shopkeepers in poor working-class ...”

“... procreational theory that constructs the male role as creative and the female role as nurturing. (Robert Alter is praised for using the word ‘seed’ in his translation of Genesis, where others fudge the problem by using ‘posterity’, ‘descendants’ or ‘progeny’. But the praise is immediately revoked: ‘Writing in the late 20th century, he cannot ...”

“... than the Americans (not that they would want me to be). However brilliant French historians may indeed have been in the past half-century (or more precisely since the founding of Annales in 1929), they seem to me to be inferior to their North American colleagues in one respect, and that is in the geographical scope of the research which is undertaken in ...”

“... sold by the hundreds of thousand: today they seem naive, and sometimes comically romantic, and may well be virtually out of print. Marie Stopes had to face unremitting, often crude attacks. After the war we met regularly to discuss her sales, usually in some dark little-frequented restaurant where her persecutors would not track her down. I was incredulous ...”

“... of the Sistine Ceiling, that Julius II’s ‘favourite theologian’ was a man whom the Pope may never have met, and whose work he may never have read? The bizarre combination of exceptional erudition and a complete lack of any acceptable historical method was one of the reasons he was such a compelling lecturer. The ...”

“... in the fields of edifying tediousness; Sir Charles Grandison, Coelebs in Search of a Wife and Robert Elsmere, fallen favourites; bored heroines in Austen, Edgeworth, Ferrier, Brontë; Victorian boredom in Dickens, Thackeray, Trollope; modern boredom in Eliot, James, Waugh, Lawrence, Stein, Brookner, Berryman, Barthelme and Bellow. This list represents ...”

“... wore leeks in their hats for childishly naughty revels and received blessings on the lines of ‘May your P & p’ – i.e. Prick & purse – ‘never fail you.’ Offenders against the rules were punished by having their penises smeared with egg yolk and oats and then exposed to the mercy of two hungry ducks. A merchant called ...”

“... 65 years after it was created, the humour seems trite and self-consciously cute, although this may be due to the current preference for technique over subtlety. Les Masques(1933) was the first ballet to incorporate what became known as the ‘Fred Step’ (a combination of five steps which he credited to Pavlova). It became a talisman, or a trademark, and ...”