“... if these were commissioned or done for personal pleasure. Nor do we have any idea why Fragonard more or less gave up painting in his fifties, though the Revolution probably had something to do with it. Much of what we do know about him has been shaped by his reception in the 19th century. Having been utterly forgotten, he was rediscovered ...”

“... Vidal once called the ‘Research and Development’ arm of American fiction – the tradition of Thomas Pynchon, Robert Coover, William Gaddis and Don DeLillo. That might not sound hard if you think of R&D as a matter of surface effects: pop-cultural references, metafictional gestures, glazed irony and so on. But for Moody (b.1961), as for Jonathan Franzen ...”

“... to deliver annoying homilies against big government and environmentalism. In the end, Genome is more soapbox than synopsis. Ridley structures the book eccentrically, with its 23 chapters numbered (and titled) to correspond to our chromosome pairs. From each chromosome, he picks a single gene to inspire an essay on a big question ...”

“... the liver to pour out glucose as fuel for muscles, the airways to open in order to make breathing more effective, the heart to accelerate and the pupils to dilate. Its effect on the brain is to make us more attentive and alert. An overdose can be fatal. The cadaver’s adrenals curled around the upper poles of the kidneys ...”

“... or ‘buried’. It’s the only figure of speech which not only everyone uses but which more or less everyone can name, even if they can’t instantly rattle off the OED’s definition of it as ‘a figure of speech in which a name or descriptive word or phrase is transferred to an object or action different from, but analogous to, that to which it ...”

“... once. When Mary was swept into her mother’s marriage crisis, the emperor was their chief friend. More than any other English monarch between Henry II and Charles II, Mary was preoccupied with a country beyond the sea, or rather a dynasty beyond the sea. She married Charles’s son Philip, and once she was married she was desperate to secure a Catholic future ...”

“... his day and good riddance. Don’t be deceived by the slick subtitles, however. Peter Lake knows more than anyone else about the religious culture of the secondary and tertiary stages of the English Reformation. This is not only a book of dazzling brilliance and acute intelligence, it has many important things to say about the construction, deconstruction ...”

“... a light but sure touch’, as if she were being praised for her pastry. Johnson’s writing is more industrial than domestic. From an early age, she kept the show on the road. Her absentee father, a colonial civil servant, dropped dead when she was 12, leaving Pamela and her mother penniless. She left school at 16, worked as a secretary, and wrote stories ...”

“... Moreau, standing on the pont de la Concorde in Paris, very briefly contemplates suicide and even more swiftly decides against it. I’ve slightly modified the translation by Douglas Parmée. Des nues sombres couraient sur la face de la lune. Il la contempla, en rêvant à la grandeur des espaces, à la misère de la vie, au néant de tout. Le jour ...”

“... Mr Abbott, he roundly denied all involvement. Mr Powell himself has reverted to vaguer, more familiar allegations of conspiracy and submission to blackmail. The real significance of the affair, however, is that it illuminates the obsessive fear of Ulster Loyalists that the two governments are acting in collusion with each other. In the Loyalist ...”

“... of society.’ Since Coulton’s time, this prosopographical approach to sanctity has become more and more popular. The American scholar John Mecklin studied the saint as a ‘culture type’ in 1941. In his book Altruistic Love (1951), the Harvard sociologist Pitirim Sorokin refined Coulton’s analysis by ...”

“... son of an earl. By issuing these and other series of his paintings as prints, Hogarth had gained more currency for his work than any other 18th or early 19th-century painter. There was no other whose name was commonly adjectivised: we don’t find ‘Reynoldsian’, for example, or ‘Turnerian’, in familiar use. But how far these prints were ...”

“... ambassador to Henry VIII’s court and included in Andrew Parrott’s The Pursuit of Musick? ‘More divine than human; they were not singing but jubilating [giubilavano].’ The exact meaning of ‘giubilavano’ has been long debated, to no avail. Or what does this résumé of national styles, written in 1517, tell us? ‘The French sing; the Spaniards ...”

“... It is a current preoccupation on the Left, more fashionable now among many students of English than Post-Structuralism, that English Literature as an academic subject is a conspiracy of the Establishment. The message coming out of the polys is that the minds of students and (more disturbingly) of schoolchildren are being insidiously moulded by the classics they study at O and A Level ...”

“... was needed and Praxiteles showed the goddess at her bath. This introduced something that was even more remarkable. For the goddess has reacted to us in a human way. We have surprised her, and she attempts instinctively to conceal from us her ‘private parts’ – thus, by the way, licensing the use of this euphemism (which is hardly appropriate for the ...”