“... generations, are titled ‘painters’ in the archive. We have a single surviving contract for a major work, from the period round 1500 when Hieronymus had grown into a force to be reckoned with – a Last Judgment commissioned by Philip the Fair. The work no longer exists. In the case of all Bosch’s surviving masterpieces – the Haywain and Adoration of ...”

“... Dinner” praised the work of local newspapers.’ Such was the alert from the US branch of a major international anti-censorship institution. Four weeks earlier, PEN announced that its annual Freedom of Expression Courage Award, which went to Charlie Hebdo in 2015, would be given in 2017 to the two million persons who participated in the women’s march ...”

“... from being skilled ‘human computers’ – basically people doing calculations – to making major scientific contributions: documenting the birth of new stars, working out what the stars are actually made of (surprise: almost all hydrogen and helium) and devising ways to measure distances across space. This all began happening at a time when American ...”

“... by the early 1970s, as the historian of management consulting Christopher McKenna has argued, the major firms had ‘quite literally decentralised most of the large companies in Europe’. To keep their profits flowing in, management consultants turned to big state institutions, reorganising government departments, conducting industrial studies and evaluating ...”

“... that the partisans had selfish, sectional aims. There’s something in both views.Via Rasella, as John Foot has observed, is seen both as a ‘heroic act of war’ and ‘a pointless and vanguardist terrorist attack’. Bentivegna belonged to the Gruppi di Azione Patriottica, which was dominated by communists and socialists (he was a Trotskyite). Many thought ...”

“... uneasy and gives its political pronouncements all the congruity of powdered chalk. Every major media outlet claims to report the truth; they must. The whole business of American journalism is based on the certainty of Truth. What Doc realises is that Truth has become a commodity to be bought, sold or spun into whatever cloth the highest bidder ...”

“... as cyanin, pelargonin and malvin. This accomplishment opened the door for the synthesis of all the major glucoside anthocyanins. Robert Robinson, his professor, was rated something of a genius in synthetic organic chemistry, and the paragraphs in which Alex Todd describes Robinson’s research strategy are among the most valuable in his book. Todd completed ...”

“... another. Increasingly, women have at least formal and legal equality with men, yet systematic and major discrepancies persist between the actual lives of women and of men. This record of failure and disability predominates even in writing which focuses mainly on the struggles and successes of the women’s movement. Even the enthusiastic progress report given ...”

“... pleasures was ‘taking the salute of other soldiers’. According to the entry for Faulkner in John Sutherland’s brilliantly entertaining Lives of the Novelists, Faulkner probably never took to the air.4 ‘What comes to mind,’ Sutherland writes, ‘is the raving George IV on his deathbed, convinced he had fought gallantly at the Battle of Waterloo ...”

“... a Bothy Nicht at the Imperial Hotel in Aberdeen where he heard the ballad singing and stories of John Strachan, an Aberdeenshire farmer who became one of his most important sources. In ‘Journey to a Kingdom’, an unpublished poem written in 1938, Henderson leaves no doubt that these northern excursions were conscious acts of homecoming. In the summer of ...”

“... Heaney, who were both a few years ahead of him at St Columb’s Catholic Grammar School (where John Hume and Brian Friel had also been pupils), he belonged to the first generation to have access to free secondary schooling after the war. He went to university at Queen’s in Belfast, spent time in London, and by the mid-1960s was back in Derry, fired up by ...”

“... tones, while falling far short of withdrawing their support for Trump. Listening to Paul Ryan, John McCain, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz and Orrin Hatch inveigh against the evil of white supremacy, you might have thought they’d just dusted off their copies of Between the World and Me. They can hardly claim to have been shocked by Trump’s response, however. As ...”

“... encased. Paragraphs are unindented, as is traditional for the opening of a book or one of its major constituent sections; this seems to characterise each one as a fresh start and weakens the sense of progressing drama. In the time frame of the book, Lizzie interacts with friends, colleagues and family members. She also experiences an election and a chaste ...”

“... McAllester and Anderson feature in each other’s books and both spend time eating with John Burns, the New York Times correspondent whom they describe frequently as the ‘doyen’ or the ‘veteran’ of the press pack. They describe the same briefings, the same riverside search for a downed American pilot, the same wait for B-52s flying from ...”

“... of flesh and blood Lady H.’ But his longing for preferment, which supplies this biography with a major theme and inspires a concern with stipends and related matters, was never to be satisfied, though in 1831 he was created a Canon of St Paul’s. ‘I asked for nothing – never did anything shabby to procure preferment.’ The first of these claims is not ...”