“... however, that puppies might serve as well as young virgins. A bit later, the English physician Thomas Sydenham recommended Shunamitism to his patients, as did the Dutch medical professor Hermann Boerhaave and the German Christoph Wilhelm Hufeland in the 18th century. James Copeland, an English medical authority who was quoted as late as the 20th century on ...”

“... all. While Chateaubriand longs for the presence of close family and friends, nothing irritates him more than empty chatter or casual acquaintances: ‘Have mercy on me!’ he begs when threatened with a visit from certain English lords and ladies. ‘Who will rescue me from these persecutions?’ Generally speaking, he tells us, ‘I do not talk with casual ...”

“... was what he called ‘common’ work – in other words, doing portraits of commoners – and this more middling clientele of gentlemen, ladies, merchants, gallants and lower-rung courtiers generally sat for him at the Maidenhead. He leased the house from the Goldsmiths’ Company, of which he was a freeman, and we have a partial record of its layout. His ...”

“... so it doesn’t get in the way; others have a metal extension that serves as a clothes rack. In more adventurous versions, the cradle holding the iron is reconfigured as an area of heat-resistant material in the shape of a helipad. All this to save labour. And yet the stanchion is so wispy that festoons of flex soon snarl up on either side of ...”

“... in New York to the one in Bilbao, he is often called a genius without a blush of embarrassment (Thomas Krens, Guggenheim director and Gehry ‘collaborator’, can’t get enough of the word). Why all the hoopla? Is this designer of metallic museums and curvy concert halls, luxury houses and flashy corporate headquarters, truly Our Greatest Living ...”

“... justify the continuation of the war, which by the time of Patten’s press conference had claimed more than 30,000 Palestinian lives, and destroyed much of the Gaza Strip, as well as displacing almost its entire population. Hamas, for its part, denied that its fighters had been guilty of rape; it claimed that they were disciplined, committed to Islamic values ...”

“... from ancient divination to modern connoisseurship. Ginzburg’s new book, Storia Notturna, more than keeps the promise of this record.* It is by far his most ambitious work to date. Subtitled ‘A Decipherment of the Sabbath’, it advances a vast, dramatic reinterpretation of the central image of the European witch craze. Far from being simply a ...”

“... directed against men and male values, with the result that men are likely to be engaged by it in a more complicated way than women. And this will be true in Britain no less than in Argentina, Puig’s country and the country where Molina and Valentin sit incarcerated. For British heterosexual men do not kiss one another. In fact, I know of no country where men ...”

“... to the factory that emerged with the Industrial Revolution; and its labour force was ‘more intensively exploited than any group of this size in history’. By a kind of poetic justice, of the three commodities Europe extracted from its plantations by such atrocious methods – cotton, tobacco, sugar – two have turned out to be semi-poisons. And ...”

“... as MP for South Gloucester. It was a swashbuckling rise by a young man full of glamour. ‘I am more fond and proud of that young man than I can put into words,’ recorded Dalton, who had been in love with him for years. Dalton was not the only one: Crosland’s grace, charm and narcissism attracted people of all ages and orientations. ‘To a young ...”

“... of the biographico-literary question I have just posed to both of us, I think I can formulate a more or less final decision about politics and Joyce. The three minutes are up. It is all a matter of definition. If the sort of politics I have been referring to did interest Joyce, then we at once understand their relevance to the man’s ...”

“... Antonello was born in the harbour city of Messina in Sicily around 1430 and died in 1479. No more than forty of his paintings survive and they are widely dispersed. Relatively few institutions are willing to lend their Antonellos, partly because of their scarcity and partly because most of the works are painted on wood, so that moving them is especially ...”

“... Keiller writes this: ‘The combination of moving camera and interior monologue suggested some more or less comic attempt to represent consciousness, or perhaps artificial consciousness – the inner experience of an alienated and rather unreliable artificial flâneur.’ Preceded by factitious titles that credit the film as a production of l‘ufficio ...”

“... representative of the Age of Reason. In particular, he hoped to challenge the condescension of Thomas Carlyle, who dismissed Hume as an associate of Voltaire and the French philosophes, and a slave to the ‘obscurations of sense, which eclipse this truth within us’. Hume had imagined, according to Carlyle, that the mechanistic logic with which he ...”

“... Church had registered a score of burials; in a town of just under 1500 inhabitants, that was more or less what would be expected. But in the half-year that followed he recorded more than 200 burials, a seventh of Stratford’s population. The plague’s fatality rate ranged from 50 per cent to 80 per cent, so as many ...”