“... abolitionists were inspired by a now quaint concern with salvation. The language used by Nicolas de Condorcet in his Reflections on the Slavery of Negroes (1781) is essentially the same as that of modern anti-racism: ‘Although I am not of the same colour as you,’ he imagined himself addressing enslaved Africans, ‘I have always regarded you as my ...”

“... the whole world; it’s this that makes of her a more divided and indeed interesting writer than Paul Binding’s new study, in its pursuit of a resolving wholeness, will allow. For she is the Optimist’s Daughter whose father died tragically in the prime of life, of leukaemia – ‘a disease that even he had never heard ...”

“... to ‘Jewish’ literalness: he saw Jewish scholarship largely through the eyes of a distorted St Paul – and sought out the ‘spirit’, not the ‘letter’. His dislike of Jews at this stage in his career is an embarrassment to modern admirers, though Heiko Oberman has shown it was pretty typical of the time. His version of Gospel truth owes much to ...”

“... the warlords they supported against the Communists. In Peking her consort for a time was Alberto de Zara, Naval Attaché at the Italian Embassy, whose enthusiasm for Mussolini was often expressed in verse. When she moved to Shanghai, she made another close friend in another dashing young Fascist, Count Galeazzo Ciano, later Mussolini’s Foreign ...”

“... is nothing but an off-shoot of desire. The sociobiologists take such a position, arguing that a man’s liking for female beauty only expresses, in a refined manner, an underlying reproductive drive. Though they start at the opposite end of the spectrum from Clark, they arrive at a similarly barren conclusion: that all beautiful women are essentially the ...”

“... The Relapse at the National Theatre. The actor playing Lord Foppington, the madly vain ‘man of fashion’, was highly talented; but he (or perhaps more likely the director) had decided to make Foppington to some degree a ‘queen’, and the result was that, brilliant though the performance was in many ways, it just wasn’t – a fatal flaw ...”

“... method is now documented in a biography – the first – by the French film historians Antoine de Baecque and Noël Herpe. Compared to his New Wave comrades, Rohmer’s work has never been especially cool or iconic, yet more than François Truffaut’s or Jean-Luc Godard’s it divides audiences right down the middle. Those who like his films are often ...”

“... herself and called him ‘laughing boy’. If those do not make you laugh, how about the idea of a man writing a book on Rabelais today without once mentioning Bakhtin? The punch-line to that one is that it turns out to be a very good book. To be accurate, Laughter at the Foot of the Cross is not entirely about Rabelais, but Rabelais is one of its two ...”

“... God.Montessori’s educational theory is both less playful than one might assume and, as Cristina de Stefano’s biography shows, more deeply rooted in Catholicism. She wrote that the task of education was to find in the child ‘the true spirit of man, the design of the Creator: the scientific and religious truth’. She ...”

“... his return to Milan from Prague in 1587, Giuseppe Arcimboldo (1527-1593) is having his first one-man show at the Palazzo Grassi in Venice: 15 February until 31 May. This is the book of the exhibition. Modern interest in Arcimboldo dates from his inclusion, by means of enlarged photographs, in the exhibition ‘Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism’, organised by ...”

“... Dominicans, then included in the Golden Legend – the collection of saints’ stories by Jacobus de Voragine – and the late medieval English sermon collection of John Mirk. The Orthodox Church, concerned to regulate monastic communities, severely penalised any behaviour that compromised masculine identity: shaving off one’s beard, and thereby appearing ...”

“... and, in the end, more poetic sense of what it was to be on the move: ‘je suis un piéton, rien de plus.’ A poet, he meant to say, needs legs, whether they’re for pacing the same worn patch of carpet – any stamping-ground from Wordsworth’s Grasmere to Olson’s Gloucester, Mass – or trudging towards the evasions of wilderness, which was so often ...”

“... In urgent need of an antidote to Paul Burrell’s memoir (see Short Cuts, 20 November), I hurried down to the London Review Bookshop to pick up a copy of Henry Green’s Loving. The recent (2000) Vintage Classics edition seemed as good a bet as any: it has a nice picture of a peacock swanking on the cover, and costs only £6 ...”

“... In​ his monumental biography of De Gaulle, Jean Lacouture describes a meeting of the Free French in London in 1941 at which several of the younger members expressed their admiration for Churchill. In response De Gaulle warned them ‘never to forget that within him breathes the soul of Pitt ...”

“... Atlantic Oceans. He couldn’t find that either, but came across Hawaii instead. Pedro Fernandez de Quiros, the Spaniard who landed in the New Hebrides (now Vanuatu) in 1605, believed he had found the southern and northern rims of a continent that stretched all the way from the western coast of New Holland (now Australia) to the eastern Pacific, and perhaps ...”