“... account as a complex if partial portrait of a man: incomplete, tendentious, unreliable, at times self-contradictory – but whose biography isn’t? Julius Caesar emerges from Suetonius’ portrait (as from other sources, including his own writings) as a man who liked to move fast and break things, who possessed both the means and the inclination to conquer ...”

“... the comic and the adventurer, were diligently cultivated by Coryate – he was a great self-publicist – and both are expressed in his best-known book, Coryats Crudities, published in 1611. The Crudities gives an exhaustive account of his travels in Europe, but his long peregrinations in the East are more sparsely documented. His last extant ...”

“... stutter and acute psoriasis, which he wrote about with bemused, clinical aplomb in his memoir Self-Consciousness (1989), he seemed to defy age and attrition, remaining nimble and smooth on the page, his brain a well-oiled Leica. With the exception of the still generative Joyce Carol Oates, a frequent pen-pal in the letters (and presiding grande dame of ...”

“... slopes. Buñuel points the camera at a goat about to risk the next precarious step, as though self-consciously for the camera, before it loses its footing and falls. He also finds a donkey being stung to death by bees. (Sour honey was the main export from the region.) The voiceover, accompanied by a piece of Brahms, announces that a group of shepherds in ...”

“... separated the theatres, one behind the other, on a vast paved piazza. But something there is, as Robert Frost says, that does not like a wall. From any angle, these schemes suggested disguised factories for making some plebeian product – meat pies, perhaps – inexplicably thrusting out of the harbour, the same problem that had inspired the soon to be ...”

“... stars, headed by the Nigerian president, Olusegun Obasanjo, the US deputy secretary of state, Robert Zoellick, the British international development secretary, Hilary Benn, and others. In less than a week, government and rebels were compelled to come to a comprehensive agreement. In the late afternoon of 5 May, after a final 20-hour negotiating ...”

“... of the European Union since the end of the Cold War, and occasion for more or less unqualified self-congratulation, has left one inconspicuous thorn in the palm of Brussels. The furthest east of all the EU’s new acquisitions, even if the most prosperous and democratic, has been a tribulation to its establishment, one that neither fits the uplifting ...”

“... misreading is not uncommon. The novel is seen as the archetypal Puritan adventure story, a self-sufficient fiction which transcends the controversies Defoe addresses in his journalism. This is rather like saying that TV programmes such as Castaway and Big Brother tell us nothing about the social moments that created them. Although some recent scholars ...”

“... to serve as a model for the nations of the world. That lies in its genetic programme.’ Self-satisfaction is scarcely unfamiliar in Europe. But the contemporary mood is something different: an apparently illimitable narcissism, in which the reflection in the water transfigures the future of the planet into the image of the beholder. What explains ...”

“... the Kent coast – Thanet Earth is a virtuous producer.Thirty Thanet Earths could bring Britain to self-sufficiency in ‘salad’, but even if you regard that as a triumph, there are snags. For one thing, new glasshouses would have to be on or near the same latitude (approx 51 degrees north), as they are in Holland, to make the most of natural light. For ...”

“... James, followed by Pound himself, Gertrude Stein, and just recently, that robustly American figure Robert Frost who, with his wife and children, had in 1913 taken up residence outside London, and from there, with Pound’s assistance and to considerable public acclaim, published A Boy’s Will, his first book of poems. According to Valerie Eliot, it was Pound ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”