“... argue that when his client was appointed commander of Central Bosnia in spring 1992, he found a self-styled citizens’ army, lacking both technical equipment and discipline. He is fond of telling the story of a man who sold his tractor and bought an anti-aircraft gun, which he used as he pleased from his front garden. What the former Chief Prosecutor of ...”

“... Well, I could never write a verse, ­– could you?Let’s to the Prado and make the most of time.Robert Browning, ‘How It Strikes a Contemporary’The world has an established place for poems about paintings – sometimes you wonder if there was ever a poet who didn’t write one – but, oddly, the poem-painting relationship doesn’t seem to be reversible ...”

“... was Kimbanguism, an Africanised Christianity that swept Congo in the 1920s. Simon Kimbangu was a self-styled prophet at a time when it seemed that only a saviour could deliver the Congolese from oppression. Born in 1889, he attracted a following as a young man by performing miracles; an elderly Kimbanguist told Van Reybrouck that Kimbangu had made his ...”

“... buildings could be seen almost everywhere in Paris. Marcel Proust was born in 1871, his brother Robert two years later. We might think a marriage between a rich Jewish girl of 21 and a well-established Gentile doctor of 36 was unusual, and so said something striking about both partners. The marriage was Jeanne’s family’s idea, it seems; no members of ...”

“... with an unusually low cover price subsidised by her own royalties. She picked a picture by Robert Capa for the cover, a young man lying dead on a heap of rubble, and composed a line of text to run underneath it: ‘A scandal that has lasted ten thousand years’. Within a year of publication, the book had sold 800,000 copies and was being discussed all ...”

“... Tory-led ministry seized on Swift’s talents. Suddenly he found himself the man of the moment. Robert Harley, the chancellor of the exchequer, employed him to write anonymously for the Examiner, a newspaper that spearheaded the government’s causes and attacked its enemies. Formally, Swift had switched sides and crossed party lines, but privately he had ...”

“... view, literary studies became a discipline. But the attempt to turn criticism into a regulated and self-replicating profession generated all kinds of tensions, and Guillory urges that many of the issues agitating the field in recent decades are best seen as a working out of these tensions. For example, ‘criticism’ never quite shook off the aspiration to be ...”

“... development. Unlike modern estates, which tend to be tacked onto existing conurbations, it was self-sufficient. It had schools, shops, pubs and a large church. ‘It was fantastic,’ Whitley says. ‘Well-made houses, big gardens, plenty of open spaces, football pitches. The buses from Cammell Laird to the docks used to flood the estate.’Forty years ...”

“... have been the first to think musically about punctuation. The eminent 18th-century grammarian Robert Lowth had compared punctuation marks to rests in music. Period, colon, semi-colon and comma are ‘in the same proportion to one another’, Lowth noted, as semi-breve, minim, crotchet and quaver.The signature of Nelly’s performance as a narrator is the ...”

“... losing face, being deep or superficial – get brought back weirdly to life.) The historian Robert Stradling pointed out some time ago that during the 44 years of Philip’s reign there was not a single day of peace; and most of the wars were far from being triumphs. This may be relevant.We might compare the lost face of Mars with that in another ...”

“... opportunity of designing buildings for an entirely new form of society. Peter Ahrends’s self-published book A3: Threads and Connections is an oblique telling of this tale, through three generations of architects. Peter founded the influential firm Ahrends, Burton and Koralek (ABK) in 1960s London, and his grandfather, Bruno, was one of the principal ...”

“... is now. Photographs were key, and Acker photographed brilliantly, especially in the shots taken by Robert Mapplethorpe: that soft, white face, with big, round eyes in the cheeks of a chubby cherub; that soft, white skin, pierced and pinched and hyperextended with hooks and rings and belts and dumb-bells: Acker was lifting weights long before lifting weights ...”

“... mental not physical damage. Only many years of psychoanalysis, he believed, had saved him from self-destruction through anxiety and depression. Most mornings, the car that took him from his home in St John’s Wood to the Observer offices near Fleet Street would divert to Sigmund Freud’s old house in Maresfield Gardens, Hampstead, where Freud’s ...”

“... was crucial. This verbal habit of the King’s was presumably the attempt of a nervous and self-conscious man to prevent the conversation from flagging – always a danger in chats with the monarch since the subject is never certain whether he or she is expected to reply or when. The onset of the King’s mania delivered him from ...”

“... mean totally different things). I don’t want to imply either that this awareness constitutes a self-evident argument in our favour or that we set out to find a compromise between two opposed extremes. Admittedly, I would have been as worried if all our recommendations had been unreservedly welcomed by the Police Federation as if they had all been ...”