“... of the future’ would bring about ‘race suicide’ by refusing to bear children: which may be a reason why he embarked on fatherhood so energetically, with a variety of women in addition to his wife. One of Wells’s most famous liaisons was with Rebecca West, mother of the author of the latest Wells biography. They met in 1912 when she was 19, he ...”

“... your personality on the stuff you use to represent the world were sacrilegious.But the change may in fact have been due to Vermeer starting to use an optical device – a camera obscura perhaps. To my eye a picture like the The Art of Painting is as good evidence that he did so as anything short of documentary proof could be. The spread-out points of ...”

“... she wants to fight, but only in the way her father and Joan of Arc fought. They both laugh. As we may or may not have worked out by this stage, the little girl grows up to become our adult heroine, the woman we have already seen on her deathbed in the film’s second scene. Soon after that a hand closes her eyes. The hand ...”

“... other great painters succeed. No painter can do everything. But the source of Rubens’s failures may also be the source of his unparalleled energy, charm and inventiveness.Take the way he paints Jesus’ dead body as it is taken down from the cross. His greatest version of this subject is in Antwerp, but there are two others in the big Rubens exhibition at ...”

“... the resumption of peace talks. Indeed, the US pressure on Abbas to keep Fayyad no matter the cost may be a way of scuttling the unity agreement without anything being said in public. It will, however, be risky for Abbas to abandon the reconciliation process, particularly if he is seen as having done so under American and Israeli pressure. After ...”

“... We need not be surprised by this. Men, at any rate, have often maintained that sexual intercourse may occur without any undue engagement of the emotions, just as love need not hinder the serious business of living and working and getting on. And nowadays a wing of the feminist movement wishes to make similar protestations of disengagement on behalf of ...”

“... is heavily on economic history – are much less clear than the trends in its tables. They may lie outside conventional economic history. Rock seeks to attribute much to a ‘colonial heritage’, but the argument is not convincing. There are a number of colonial heritages in the Americas which have produced rather different results. The Spanish Empire ...”

“... but now cannot pass the examinations that will get him into ‘a top university’. Readers may share my concern for Tom, and will want to advise him to forget about Oxford and look around for an accommodating steam laundry. He owes it to his parents. Enter, upon this domestic scene, the tempter, the accuser: a gypsy with a guitar, a seductive ...”

“... novels sometimes experience the Gentiles as people who pretend they were never children). We may regularly be asked to protect people’s favourite versions of themselves, but we don’t always have to agree. Roth’s novels have shown us what it looks like when we don’t, and how relieved we are when we do. Children are compelled, at least at first, to ...”

“... or it might be an adult white blood cell. The information derived from such a genetic screen may bear on a person’s future health, life-expectancy and mental stability. Science has presented us with these far-reaching new possibilities before their implications have been thought through. In the United States, doctors and scientists are worried that ...”

“... editorial note tells us, solved the situation. Betjeman’s heart was thoroughly engaged; he may actually have suffered the sleepless nights he claims to have had. At all events we can be sure he would have lost more sleep over it than he did over the situation in Europe at the time. The same unsmiling fervour characterises a letter to Jack Beddington a ...”

“... since they continue to provide us with so much of our vocabulary. Europa stands for Europe, we may wish to say, just as Narcissus is the original narcissist and Harmony is harmony. The divine rapes (and much else) in Greek myth have been interpreted as figuring military invasions. At a more general level, they can be seen as a projection of the supposed ...”

“... heating; it survived all that the Beatles could do to it in the ‘Peacock Revolution’; and it may yet survive the attempts of the master tailors to price themselves out of existence. Chenoune finds himself repeatedly paying tribute to the English influence on men’s fashion. Successive waves of Anglomania swept France even during the Revolutionary ...”

“... among many rights which were old, one which was new: ‘That the Subjects which are Protestants may have Arms for their Defence suitable to their Condition and as allowed by Law.’ This was the model for the American Bill of Rights of 1791: ‘A well regulated Militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear ...”

“... a possible touch of self-pity. Verdi is at once exciting and safe. One reason why he seems safe may be that, after all, we don’t know him as well as we think. His life coincided with the high point of archive creation – after the establishment of reliable postal services and European peace; before the coming of telephones, small flats, and aeroplane ...”