“... for One of Ours, and what Cather called ‘love letters’ from young men struck by the September-May romance of A Lost Lady. And she lived, according to some posthumous critics, as a closeted homosexual. Cather had many potential reasons for forbidding publication of her letters. Willa Cather in New Hampshire in 1917. Reading them suggests a more ...”

“... part of her own Life composed two more for her obscure patron saints, Rupert and Disibod. She may have drawn on oral tradition and now lost sources, but much of her material stemmed from visions and what contemporaries called inventio (‘discovery’). When all else failed, hagiographers could resort to plagiarism. Gregory of Tours explained why one ...”

“... disregard for the rule of international law. He quotes General Mike Jackson, who toured Basra in May 2003 after the victory over Saddam. ‘It is startlingly apparent,’ Jackson reported to London, ‘that we are not delivering that which was deemed to be promised and is expected.’ Jackson was encouraged to keep his concerns to himself, since this was ...”

“... a national conciliator and broker of industrial peace. In 1957 his chief ally in the Labour Party, Richard Crossman, complained in his diary that Wilson ‘grows fatter, more complacent and more evasive each time you meet him’ – and then resolved to make him prime minister. Even Wilson’s enemies found it difficult to pin down precisely what it was they ...”

“... that, along with the regretted scholastic exchanges, passionate love letters went up in smoke. It may simply have been more about those bears.This isn’t the only bonfire to have made Wade’s task more difficult. When the economic historian Eileen Power died in 1940, her sisters burned most of her personal papers. It is impossible to know whether this was a ...”

“... uses the phrase in a more nuanced way. His subtitle points to the fact that while Harold Godwinson may have been ‘the last English king’ (actually he was half-Danish), and possibly the ‘last of the Saxon kings’ (though that is just Bulwer-Lytton deflecting the shame of defeat away from England), unlike his predecessor, Edward the Confessor, he had no ...”

“... no more than rumour, like the one about Augustus and the figs. The most prolific court poisoner may have been the eunuch Bagoas, who is said to have killed two Persian kings before succumbing himself during a failed attempt on the life of Darius III (if you believe Diodorus of Sicily). During the long search for an elixir of life several Chinese emperors ...”

“... in its original scoring; the piano accompaniments for the others have a space and colour that may stem from their instrumental origins. ‘Orpheus with His Lute’, with words from Shakespeare’s Henry VIII, opens the cycle with rising E major semi-quavers, and moments of harmonic shock, with voice and piano sometimes just a tone apart. ‘Under the ...”

“... puts this stale little homily in the mouth of the Duke of Norfolk in the ridiculous first scene of Richard II where two young lords spoiling for a fight, Norfolk and Bolingbroke, swagger before their monarch. No one explains the reason for their quarrel. Norfolk, rather like some of Mr Carter-Ruck’s clients, seems to be an over-sensitive upper-class ...”

“... over-treatment in the US, while fund-holding and drug budgets are feared here because they may encourage under-treatment). Both parties also believe that the recent NHS reforms are of quite momentous significance. A foreign observer might at first be puzzled, since the reforms appear to consist mostly of accounting changes, and will still leave the UK ...”

“... F.R. Leavis, as well as about Measure for Measure, which Leavis admired and which Wittgenstein may or may not have read or seen but was not predisposed to like. Yet it would be wrong to suppose that Hawkes is merely engaged in a ludic ramble. He earns some of his jokes, and one of the best things about his books is that ...”

“... these criticisms. ‘Bloated and muddled’, Hofstadter calls Gebstedter, and many readers may agree. The book is long. It is a pot-pourri. It is repetitive. The structure is haphazard. These are fair criticisms, but they are criticisms which miss one essential point of what is new and interesting in the Hofstadter phenomenon. This is a quality perhaps ...”

“... in Piero’s native town of Sansepolcro in the middle decades of the 15th century, the style may have seemed startling, but the content surely did not. Even the angels, the one major feature not explained by the Gospels, would have been familiar from earlier representations of the story. In the past they had usually been shown praying or reverently ...”

“... are sliding down the league tables of national wealth, income, longevity and productivity. This may reveal only our low expectations – but it may do something to explain why the public is so hard to arouse in the cause of political and administrative efficiency, and why it’s myopic to lash out at Whitehall rather than ...”

“... change’. ‘I hope Syrian President Bashar Assad will consider reforms, otherwise he may say to himself: “I could be the second target,”’ Richard Perle told the Arabic newspaper Asharq al-Awsat in February 2003. As Washington sought to isolate Damascus, some Arab powers – especially Saudi Arabia and ...”