“... he’s quickly recording the patterns of light across this body part or that on an umbered canvas. David Hockney’s now familiar guess that lenses covertly facilitated Caravaggio’s cinematic effects came with a salute to his ‘terrific talent’. My guess is that we should cut out the middleman, and that the only apparatus involved was Caravaggio’s own ...”

“... to be safe. In principle, this does not give rise to any constitutional problems, although it may insufficiently protect human rights. European countries were deemed safe by the Asylum and Immigration (Treatment of Claimants, etc) Act 2004. The inclusion of Greece was considered by the Appellate Committee of the House of Lords – the forerunner of the ...”

“... DNB, hoped that it would turn out to be one of the ‘most amusing’ of books. This remark may have to be interpreted in the light of the fact that Stephen’s own preferred form of ‘amusement’ involved hanging by his fingertips from a ledge on the Matterhorn in the middle of a blizzard, but it is true that an abundance of pleasure, of a certain ...”

“... he explains, because ‘child protection agencies made access to children impossible.’ But one may feel that the omission is a ‘serious defect’ of the most unarguable sort, such that Dr Li should have contemplated redesigning his research once the agencies created obstacles (if this is indeed what happened). So much hinges on the experience of the ...”

“... them was consistent with Frieda having no ‘reluctance ... to occupy the mothering position’ may not, if judgments are called for, be so easily agreed. My own feeling is that among those who care for these matters (and they are not exclusively censorious male oppressors, as here imagined) there is much less animus against Frieda than Jackson chooses to ...”

“... the ads apart, gives a taste of the kind of journalism which the logic of revenue and distribution may encourage. Such beasts, fat on advertisements, are not pernicious in themselves, but they do threaten their leaner rivals. To buy more printed paper when you have not got through the pile which came on Sunday seems absurd. Expense is not the only factor. Time ...”

“... No nation redeemed me, nor created me; I remember eternity before this age; The Key of David opened my lips, Rome named me a man. He warned the Poles against chauvinism, seized as they were by an otherwise understandable hatred of the partitioning powers. ‘I stand opposed to any system of blood and race ... Europe is not a race but a principle ...”

“... of the radicals, in order to demonstrate that as a result of those activities the King “may” have been killed, and “must” have been put in danger of his life’. These arguments were first unveiled in September 1794 in the indictments against Thomas Hardy, shoemaker and secretary of the LCS, John Horne Tooke, philologist and radical man of ...”

“... saw Igbo officers hunted down and murdered. Then the murders became massacres. ‘Massacre’ may seem melodramatic. But perhaps because the events leading to the Nigeria-Biafra war are so often eclipsed by the war itself, so little remembered, it seems an apt word for the thousands of Igbo civilians in the North who were killed between ...”

“... maps (all rectangles and broad arrows), and in a wealth of jargon which non-enthusiasts (like me) may struggle with. (I was inoculated against all things military by compulsory service in my school’s ludicrous CCF.) It all reads persuasively, however, even to a non-enthusiast; partly because – as is becoming customary (see the books on Britain’s later ...”

“... an underground, chimerical story of Valentino’s queerness. As a contrarian category, queerness may be passé, and yet, reading Dark Lover, I feel nostalgia for the notion that gorgeous, sexually ambiguous movie stars provide grist for the gay mill. ‘Outing’, however morally dubious, thrills a reader who twists received stories for the pleasure of ...”

“... on the retreat but able to stage daily suicide bomb attacks, ambushes and assassinations. On 4 May a man with explosives attached to his body blew himself up in a queue of young men trying to join the police in Arbil, killing 60 of them and wounding 150. Ghassan Attiyah, a political commentator in Baghdad, told me that ‘the Kurds were able to destabilise ...”

“... Center. Even the American Medical Association’s ethics institute draws on industry funds. This may not be all that remarkable in an era when academic medical centres increasingly depend on corporate ‘partnerships’. But many individual bioethicists are embarking on private, for-profit consulting ventures with industry to supplement their university pay ...”

“... you – or your browser, at least – to the website. (Cookies do have expiration dates, but they may be years in the future.) Then there are ‘pixels’. The type of pixel used as a tool to gather data is a tiny, transparent image, which you can’t see on your screen. When I first realised that, without knowing it, I must have downloaded pixels of this ...”

“... or quasi-coalition regimes beholden to Moscow.’ If that was indeed the intention – and it may well have been – there would have been little objection to it on the part of Russia’s wartime allies, who in 1945 were in no mood to peer too closely behind a semi-respectable democratic façade. A policy of ‘Finlandisation’ in East and Central Europe ...”