“... much like our own, Shapiro quotes the sonneteer Giles Fletcher, who wrote in 1593 that ‘A man may write of love, and not be in love, as well as of husbandry, and not go to the plough, or of witches and be none.’ ‘If Giles Fletcher could compose sonnets to “try” his “humour”,’ Shapiro says, ‘Shakespeare could have done so too.’ True, and ...”

“... and gladiatorial contests, but there is little chance of the same happening here. In practice, one may be sure, it will be the new elite who will flock to the games in their Mercs and BMWs. It is quite common in South Africa for higher civil servants or mayors and councillors from poor areas to award themselves trips to the Olympics or other such international ...”

“... A man may find Naples or Palermo merely pretty,’ James Elroy Flecker, one-time British vice-consul in Beirut, wrote in October 1914, ‘but the deeper violet, the splendour and desolation of the Levant waters, is something that drives into the soul.’ A month later, Russia, Britain and France declared war on the Ottoman Empire in response to the Turkish fleet’s foolhardy bombardment of Odessa and Sevastopol ...”

“... is much better, muscular and panoramic, but it lacks the surprise details and sense of outrage of David Peace’s treatment in his great miner’s strike novel, GB84.* Welsh makes his political points more effectively through his storytelling. Renton and Sick Boy move to London and live in a filthy towerblock in pre-gentrification Hackney – ‘the London ...”

“... mutually hostile zones. To speak, as Sumption does, of an ‘iron curtain’ partitioning France may be an exaggeration, but the geographical, legal, even psychological division of the country, which had always been difficult to unite, was not resolved for a long time. The city of Paris, which looms large throughout Sumption’s narrative, became intolerable ...”

“... when Percy was the most successful tragedy of the time, and her closest friends were the actor David Garrick and his wife, Eva, was the cause of some dismay to sober-minded Evangelicals. But Roberts had an answer to that. He was not offering ‘a perfect specimen of Christianity’, but an account of a heroic triumph: More had mixed with the society ...”

“... escaped from a prison camp and joined a band of Italian partisans during the Second World War. David Storm Rice, an expert on Islamic metalwork, had an affair with Clara Malraux, fought as a commando in Ethiopia and, after a distinguished career as an art historian, suffered a nervous breakdown and committed suicide. Robin Zaehner carried out dangerous ...”

“... were mere material for mockery. Amis quotes in his autobiography a truly hilarious parody of Lord David Cecil’s lecturing manner, admitting that he borrowed it from John Wain. I remember Wain ‘doing’ J.B. Leishman and F.W. Bateson, both of whom he respected, in a similar way. Such were the amusements of the Movement before its members became ...”

“... private conversations over oil and gas deals in Eurasia. Or both. You never know with Baker, who may be representing his law firm, Baker Botts, which represents Halliburton; or Baker Hughes, the oil services company that was promised the second tier of oil-field restoration contracts in Iraq after Halliburton’s engineering and construction subsidiary ...”

“... and is immediately carried headlong downstream. The context for humans’ experience of the world may be presented in this unillusioned way, but the poem is not unrelievedly bleak. Farmers may not be living in the Garden of Eden, but they are not living in the moral corruption of the city either, and Virgil conveys an ...”

“... was handed in before Christmas; leaks suggest it proposed many urgent reforms, but apparently it may never be published. Instead, Whitehall departments are planning to set up and loudly publicise their own ‘British’ spending programmes, running parallel to the operations of Scottish and Welsh ministries. That was the real motive for the sudden additional ...”

“... was a Naval officer as Trelawney had been, but probably of a more sober and reliable type, which may have been just as well. After physically assaulting an unpopular lieutenant Treawney went absent, by his own account, while still a midshipman, deserting his ship in the Seychelles and living with an exotic lady called Zela who was always clad in striped ...”

“... environment not otherwise deemed to have colour. The ocean in which these arbitrary islands float may in principle be white – that, famously, has been the ideal for interiors where Modernist art is displayed. Or, more likely, in the cooler design manners of recent years, something less absolute – creams, cloud-greys, the self-effacing neutralities of MDF ...”

“... resolution of the paradox the harem presents in relation to sexual appetite: although the seraglio may contain many women, coupling is, by definition, done in pairs and stamina sets a limit on serial or collective performance. She sees in the blissful, figure-cushioned interior he has assembled (much of it from other paintings, not all of them his own) a ...”

“... liberation – not less for love but expanding/Of love beyond desire’, continues: History may be servitude, History may be freedom. See, now they vanish The faces and places, with the self which, as it                              could, loved them, To become renewed, transfigured, in ...”