“... which can enlist the sympathy and attention of medical practitioners. A syndrome offers those who may be having a hard time the validation of the victim’s role. Validation seems to be the key here – and it is Showalter’s attack on their system of inner validation which makes chronic fatigue syndrome sufferers so angry with her. If chronic fatigue ...”

“... country in ‘a bad light’. The suggestion that if the world does spare a glance at India, it may notice some not very attractive features, is deeply resented. But then the self-esteem of the metropolitan bourgeoisie is a fragile thing. ‘Don’t talk to me about poverty and all that, please,’ the bright young trainee at the Indian Express admonishes ...”

“... with the disciplines of the 12-step group, he likes to ‘identify’. His current appearance may be an act of identification with PWAs (his equivalent of the red ribbon), with Bosnian refugees, Sudanese famine victims or Jodie Kidd. My reading of Stipe’s prematurely geriatric persona is less cynical. During its heyday in the Eighties, the group was ...”

“... them, he has pursued a roughly Warburgian path of investigating the 16th-century intellect. That may suggest Foucauldian overtones, and indeed we can find him juggling with the master’s Renaissance episteme, the cosmos of resemblances and affinities which was to be superseded in the age of Descartes by a new cosmos of identities and hiatuses. Grafton is ...”

“... 6.9 per cent of income, 9-10 per cent below what used to be normal. Whatever this private deficit may portend for the future, it is certainly entirely different from anything that has ever happened before – at least in the US. The general view seems to be that private expenditure has risen because capital gains are being spent; so everything should be all ...”

“... has become the sunny New South Africa, a country against which the rest of the civilised world may once again safely play cricket and where a holiday hardly registers on your credit card. The Anti-Apartheid Organisation has been disbanded. Fergal Keane has packed up his microphone and gone home. In Trafalgar Square, a beaming Nelson Mandela casts a ...”

“... Hussein’s regime has highlighted the UN’s importance and the peculiar nature of its power. It may be a talking-shop, but it is also the repository of a legitimacy that no single nation can claim. Without this legitimacy, brute force finds it difficult to accomplish anything that is lasting. It was because the UN’s founders understood this, from their ...”

“... performing their parts; but the possessed priests were genuinely beside themselves. Dog’s Dick may have started as a joke, but by the time he inhabited Father Tranquille he was as authentic as a demon can be. This is the story of Loudun. We already know it, for Aldous Huxley, writing against the background of McCarthyism, told it in The Devils of Loudun ...”

“... individual effort required to produce it. If Winchester has his way, Smith’s portrait may yet appear on the £10 note, and the ‘father of English geology’ nudge Darwin off it. Smith was fortunate to have first studied the strata around Bath, where the rock succession provided a ready key to his understanding. He was also blessed with unusual ...”

“... weren’t always bright enough to think very much at all, and Bessy’s flaw in Arabella’s eyes may be that she thinks too much. The pages Arabella has devoted to her are devastating. For all her efforts to leave her past behind her, it seems Arabella knows exactly who she is. The Bessy section is headed: ‘The Most Particular Case of a Low ...”

“... and engaged in a very active public life – if his ambition to ‘ruin the great work of Time’ may be thought to qualify for that description. Cromwell’s progression from private to public could be used to illustrate a point Spacks borrows from Habermas (‘individual self-contemplation prepared the way for the assumption of power’), though in the 17th ...”

“... the substance. Thales thought it was water. He recognised that living creatures require water, and may have made observations about evaporation and condensation. From this, he extrapolated that water was the necessary precondition not just for life, but for the whole cosmos. In his system the Earth floated on water: earthquakes could be explained by occasional ...”

“... of an invasion in 2023. The news sometimes seems to provide support for their position. On 23 May, China began major military exercises around Taiwan that it described as ‘punishment’ for comments made by the new president in Taipei, Lai Ching-te, in his inauguration speech.Why must the war be over Taiwan, which since 1972 the US has officially ...”

“... method can also help him solve it. He encourages Eratosthenes to try it, speculating that others may find exciting new mathematics with it. When Heiburg’s transcription was circulated, it seemed to confirm a feature of Archimedes’ work that had been suspected for some time: some of his abstruse theories, particularly those about centres of mass, ...”

“... Legacy: Van Dyck to Cézanne (until 10 April). Equally, he thought about the ways the human frame may veer into deformation (Sedition as hag) or rise into personhood. Coming at things this way, Rubens is hardly a portraitist in the sense his pupil Van Dyck is. Whereas you feel the latter is reacting to some grande dame’s jitters, Rubens homes in on what he ...”