“... On Sunday 16 May, a day before the IDF launched its long-awaited, well-planned attack on the civilian population of Rafah, the Israeli chief of staff, Major-General Moshe (Boogey) Ya’alon said it was ‘almost the last chance’ for such an operation and that ‘special conditions were in place’ for an imminent attack ...”

“... of the top and bottom of the quennet give the effect of a long Essex horizon, around which an eye may dart and pick out things in their severalness:Deserted benches      Resting gull      Tilted boat                                       Rotten hullThe short middle lines can be a bit like rivulets of ...”

“... that ‘dancing is often the only real, the only serious business’ in these movies, but we may not have remembered how much and how variously they are about dancing. In Shall We Dance a Russian star of classical ballet played by Fred Astaire wants to tap like Fred Astaire, although his manager thinks this slip into popular nonsense ...”

“... and Noah Baumbach), a character makes a horrible discovery about reality: it keeps changing. This may seem obvious and is only part of the truth anyway. One of reality’s other problems is that it doesn’t change enough. But we understand the horror.If we had been born into a place designed to exclude change and many other inconveniences, a place where we ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... two of his colleagues ‘enemies of the people’ for ruling that the then prime minister, Theresa May, couldn’t trigger Article 50 – which started the process of leaving the EU after the Brexit referendum – without a vote in Parliament.In recent times complaints of judicial activism have often concerned the interpretation of the Human Rights Act and the ...”

“... 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 ...”