“... is a kind of drab olive; in the Rylands, with the sun coming through the windows, it is brighter, more like light khaki, setting off the black ink of its text very clearly. The text itself, on one side of the fragment, comes from John 18, the passage in which Pilate asks: ‘What is truth?’ The other thing that de Hamel’s reproduction can’t show, but ...”

“... consulting physician at the Royal Hospital for Diseases of the Chest. ‘I have not often derived more pleasure and instruction from a book,’ Stevenson wrote to him, confessing that he felt ‘but a wreck’ and was filled with anxieties, though he believed he had been right not to go to Davos, ‘to an air charged with germs’. Already the author of vivid ...”

“... This extraordinary book examines the practice and the cultural contexts of human sacrifice, more or less from its speculative prehistoric beginnings to Margaret Atwood’s recent novel The Blind Assassin. To succeed in such an enterprise an author must be fantastically well read, expert in the disposition of large tracts of material in various languages, some of it by great artists and some by no less useful journeymen ...”

“... from Cathcarts Hill’ (1855)PreviousNext The camera’s capacity for transformation makes us more nervous than it did the Victorians. Fenton wasn’t a war reporter, bearing false witness; he was under orders from the printsellers Agnew and Sons, who, besides betting on a market for his photographs, had also commissioned a history painting from ...”

“... mask.Dunbar pulls off something complicated here: he captures Black Americans’ rejection of what Thomas Jefferson called ‘that immovable veil of black which covers all the emotions’ while also articulating the reason some of us embraced the idea of a mask in the first place. Unlike the fabric cover-ups we wear today, which do ...”

“... his shoulders.’ Roy is destined to dominate his son’s field of vision, to appear magically more than lifesize; already Harry is struggling to get him into proportion.The squire attempts to buy Roy off. He responds with what we will soon recognise as a characteristic piece of impromptu rhetoric, gathering momentum and conviction from sentence to ...”

“... are urged to test a body of thought not against competing bodies of thought but against something more easily accessible – our moral intuitions. If you know that the very idea of relativity is a product of cultural decadence, you are spared the trouble of labouring through a lot of equations and then deciding whether the phenomena can be explained ...”

“... had just failed with liabilities of somewhat over £250,000. He wrote: ‘I was touched by nothing more than by their sorrowful patience, without any fierceness against Providence or against mankind, or disposition to find fault with anything but their own imprudence; and there was a simple dignity, too, in their not assuming the aspect of stoicism.’ I have ...”

“... Can any profession be more altruistic and noble than medicine? It comes as rather a scandalous suggestion that doctors may themselves be sick. Not just overworked and exhausted, and statistically liable to alcoholism, drug-dependence and suicide: but actually deficient in their psychological make-up. This shocking possibility has recently been floated by Glin Bennet, who argues that medicine holds special attractions for those suffering from flawed personalities ...”

“... in which Julian/Theroux is making love to his girlfriend, an African called Yomo: Yomo was even more sensual than she looked. When she and Julian made love, which was often, and always by the light of candles, she howled eagerly in the ecstasy of sex like an addict injected, and her eyes rolled up in her skull and she stared, still howling, with big white ...”

“... the Scottish borders called Christopher Murray Grieve walked to Ecclefechan, the birthplace of Thomas Carlyle. It wasn’t a long way, but his trek was a gesture of hero-worship to one of the greatest Scotsmen and largest egos of the previous century. He toured Carlyle’s house and, as some visitors did, tried on the great man’s hat. To his enormous ...”

“... What are academic instincts, and are they about more than survival? For Frederick Crews, emeritus professor of English at Berkeley, literary study in the university is a Darwinian battle for power and status, with professors ‘teaching the conflicts’ as they claw their way up the academic ladder. For Marjorie Garber, William R ...”

“... young mind. When we visited Maidstone Carriage Museum, a sign on a coach door read ‘room for one more inside’ (or something similar), which was too eerily like the line spoken by the hearse driver in the first of the stories. But it was the ventriloquist and his weird puppet that really got to me – Redgrave’s descent into mania alongside Hugo’s ...”

“... person. No other writer, except possibly Alan Bennett, has set out to make us love King George more. Or admire him more. From the start, Roberts is intent on glorifying George. Gone is the difficult pupil whom J.H. Plumb in The First Four Georges described as ‘lethargic and incapable of concentration’ and ‘who was ...”

“... being so upset that he did not come (she had cooked pheasant, John drove to the station) and, more interestingly, out of her decision to grovel rather than embarrass, and annoy, Herman by saying, here is the original letter, why on earth did you pretend to send a carbon? She knew, of course, Herman would never forgive her if he was humiliated; anxious to ...”