“... royal twin (Oedipus, King Arthur, Krishna). Wright regards ‘mythologising’ as little more than ‘lying’: separated twins who overdramatise their resemblances, or make up stories in order to get into the press, are ‘mythologising’, a charge supported by the likelihood that ‘the press’ in this instance is the National Enquirer, the ...”

“... proved decisive in the face of a narrow, but clear, national majority for the losing candidate. More recently, the State of California has presented another challenge to the straightforwardness of democracy as the rest of the world imagines it, with the proposal to recall an elected governor in possession of an unambiguous and unexpired democratic ...”

“... but not always with ‘my girlfriend’). Writers, on the other hand, are well known to get more than their fair share of such bounty: it’s one of the things for which the world admires them, and/or envies them, and/or hates their guts. And writers don’t often discuss how it feels to hold such freedom, though travelling, idling, quasi-colonial ...”

“... the Scottish words ‘Loch Shiel’ over and over again. The idea seemed to be that this was more ‘religious’, a small Jerusalem moment. The theology tended towards literalism, but a literalism of the spirit rather than of the word: intelligent evangelicism – the church was in a university town. Nobody believed that Genesis was creation’s ...”

“... it is all dressed up, most real when it’s at its most sham self. The architect and pamphleteer Thomas ‘Victorian’ Harris fretted about the 19th century’s inability to create an architecture peculiar to itself, its age, its engineering, its steam power and its myriad inventions, all the while failing to see that the architecture he craved was being ...”

“... its quizzical severity: que sais-je? Or so we are told. In practice, though, the essay tends to be more or less the precise opposite of such a sober and responsible self-examination. The writers who have used the form in the questioning spirit – the essayists, from Montaigne to Stanley Cavell, who generate a sense that the act of writing is for them a ...”

“... For several years, until he became Labour leader and had to watch his entry more carefully, Neil Kinnock claimed in Who’s Who to be the author of an anthology of the writings and sayings of Aneurin Bevan entitled What Nye said: each year the supposed publication date was authoritatively amended, although the book has never appeared ...”

“... of Ireland in the 18th Century, but it will find the proximity of works of its own century much more uneasy company. Not only does the title invite endless tutorial discussions on why this particular period should be singled out as the ‘Age of Imperialism and Revolution’, but the meaning of ‘Ireland’ as here discussed opens up a Pandora’s box of ...”

“... is that it is simultaneously political and cultural. This is a mode of argument, but perhaps even more of assumption, which has often seemed alien and unacceptable east of Offa’s Dyke, though its relevance to the English experience can be shown to be just as direct. Within Wales, the two truths, or those versions of them which are reciprocally dismissed as ...”

“... work fulfilled the demands of the moment. The closer any particular past development is to us, the more difficult it is to maintain this historicist commitment to the self-containment of the past: art historians continue to cordon off the early Symbolist Mondrian and the naturalist who continued to paint flowers all his life from the properly Modernist artist ...”

“... leaders and intellectuals, including Stalin, Einstein, Henry Ford, Mussolini, Fritz Kreisler, Thomas Mann, John Dos Passos, H.L. Mencken, Anatole France, H.G. Wells, the dean of Harvard Law School, Roscoe Pound and 205 members of the law school’s 1927 graduating class. Interest in the case did not die with the men’s executions. It has been the subject ...”

“... and high-quality decision-making. No matter, as the authors of an article entitled ‘Who is (more) rational?’, published in the American Economic Review in 2014, cheerfully conclude: ‘Decision-making ability, unlike preferences, may be justifiably manipulated.’ Just give the poor a bit of a nudge, and they’ll shape up.That was then. And as we ...”

“... for his fellow alters, since the narrator, at this point, hasn’t been ‘called out’ – a more sensible psychotherapist soon turns up, and treatment proceeds without reference to extraterrestrials. However, sceptics would retort that MPD therapists’ reliance on recovered memories is no less faith-based than a belief in past-life ...”

“... purpose: ‘to make demonstrations on behalf of the natural order’. He also painted subjects more usually associated with botanical artists since the 17th century. Tulips, fritillaries and auriculas throng the Driehaus Museum in this last leg of A New Perspective on Nature’s American tour (until 17 August). McEwen was respectful of the tradition of ...”

“... a genius like Flaubert: doesn’t this also mean we’d like to cut him down to size? Is there not more vanity involved in putting a ‘good question’ than there can ever be in providing a sound answer? And if there is a sound answer, can the question really have been all that good? These are the circles that Barnes’s people tend to move in, round and ...”