“... I thought about it as we drove for days through the overwhelming shade and the eternal drizzle of Washington State’s Olympic National Park. We had to take the ocean on trust, hearing the roll of the breakers, but seeing nothing, blinded by the spray of enormous rigs carrying logs to railside woodyards and to Seattle. Taking responsibility for a portion of ...”

“... not only on one politician or party, and least of all on the Civil Service and the executive. Peter Jenkins of the Guardian was the first to get it right, when he told a protest rally: ‘This is Parliament’s war!’ The end of the Falklands affair was not difficult to condemn either. The problem of the islands had been rendered far more ...”

“... of Ecstasy, a juvenile descendant of the Winged Victory, also closely related to Loie Fuller and Peter Pan, first perched upon the bonnet of a Rolls-Royce. By the Thirties architecture had begun to envy the sleek and aggressive forms employed in modern cars and ocean liners especially. We can see this from the spectacular perspectives hanging on the stairs ...”

“... most perfect character in history’, more practical than Saint Louis, holier than George Washington, and kinder than Charlemagne or Edward I. To Alfred were routinely ascribed the beginnings of all the most characteristic and prestigious English institutions: Oxford University (though few can seriously have believed that), the Royal Navy, universal ...”

“... the rambunctious Lambert lives were and are entertaining. The life of the patriarch, George Washington, father of the like-named painter and as short-lived as his successors (1832-73), is little documented: he was a Baltimore railway engineer who emigrated to St Petersburg to work there; he died from heart failure on a visit to London two months before ...”

“... fresh nation ... with one more possession of beauty’. The translator, therefore, can resemble a Washington or a Jefferson as much as a traditional monarch, and like Aeneas he plants the old gods in a new place and a new language. The Virgilian theme and the language question are subtly explored in Brian Friel’s Translations, a play that was first ...”

“... and satisfying menu; but the reader who misses the great names of the period should be warned that Peter Eisenman, Richard Rogers, Alvaro Siza, Jean Nouvel and Rem Koolhaas (along with the central figure in Barcelona’s historic renewal, Oriol Bohigas) are all represented by substantial essays or interviews. I am not sure whether the distribution of these ...”

“... arrived early. Aged six, she gouged out Tinker Bell’s eyes in an illustrated edition of Peter Pan (‘My first act of proto-feminist critique in the realm of the visual’). Referring to it as a ‘desecration’, Nochlin said: ‘I hoped it hurt, and I was both frightened and triumphant looking at the black holes in the expensive paper. I hated ...”

“... highly complicated romantic relationship’ with Ardeshir Zahedi, the Iranian ambassador to Washington, and Warhol was able to tell friends that Zahedi ‘was getting nervous about her getting serious’, perhaps, he suggested, because ‘she can’t convert to Moslem … she’d never make a movie again, right? God, life is really hard. I ...”

“... of the shifts and retractions she comments on.) Several faculty members (including Daniel Bell and Peter Gay) left Columbia because of the student uprising and the generally benign faculty response to it, while the Congress for Cultural Freedom sputtered on for I don’t know how long. Most of the ‘liberal anti-Communists’ of the Fifties and Sixties soon ...”

“... temporarily suspended in the wake of the coup: there is no serious ‘human rights’ issue for Washington. The US is not alone in this. When Shinzo Abe visited Cairo last month he spoke of the ‘high esteem’ in which the Japanese government holds its relationship with Sisi, and pledged hundreds of millions of dollars in development loans. Diplomatic ...”

“... Duomo; and the windswept David, painted on a leather shield now in the National Gallery of Art in Washington. In a lost Assumption of the Virgin, it is said, he portrayed himself as Judas. There is no doubting Andrea’s impact among his contemporaries: a challenging figure with a faintly lurid reputation. But was he also a murderer? According to the early ...”

“... retired now but that’s what I was doing when I started writing this: I wrote and I waited to get Peter’s dinner out of the oven. Peter got 24-hour care, and I did three seven-hour shifts a week. I enjoyed the connectedness that working always gave me, the benchmarks at the end of every shift: pill box empty, kitchen ...”

“... the four or five last great predators of humanity’. Eilperin, an environmental reporter for the Washington Post, has travelled the world trying to understand sharks and human interactions with them. She has swum with reef sharks in the Caribbean and whale sharks in the Gulf of Mexico; she has cage-dived with great whites off South Africa. She has quizzed ...”

“... no major American newspaper had ever spelled out Iran’s grievances against the AIOC. Rather, the Washington Post claimed that the people of Iran were not capable of being ‘grateful’. Looking back remorsefully, the New York Times correspondent in Tehran, Kennett Love, later described Mossadegh as a ‘reasonable man’ acting under ‘unreasonable ...”