“... for in the family, and which her family so signally fails to develop in her. Be that as it may, she contrives to take an overview of her life across the years without losing a sense of the oddness, partiality and contingency of its shape. One striking example of this is her account of the (de) forming of her sexual life because of an infantile ...”

“... Melbourne spent two winters in Glasgow, living plainly and studying with John Millar, disciple of David Hume and Adam Smith, and one of the most influential proselytisers for the Scottish Enlightenment. This experience gave him a strong commitment to the principles of political economy; it also profoundly influenced his thinking on the relationship between ...”

“... still in his twenties Fried had become a leading critic of contemporary art, an occupation which may not sound very different from being an art historian, though perhaps less respectable. Yet from Baudelaire onwards, an engagement with contemporary painting has been vital to some of the greatest poets; and the best art critics, aside from those who were ...”

“... turns out to be less unlikely than it might sound: it seems that Bentham repeatedly wrote to David Collins, Lieutenant-Governor of the Port Philip colony, encouraging him to build a panopticon in New South Wales. A convict called Pobjoy exists in history, as does a penal chronicler called Lemprière, who worked at Macquarie Harbour as a storekeeper ...”

“... Malawi. I am thinking of Kenneth Mdala’s suggestions for the memorials to Queen Victoria and David Livingstone – suggestions which I somewhat desperately, and ultimately unsuccessfully, attempted to interpret as ironic. Victoria was for Kenneth Mdala, as for many Africans, an icon. She was the ‘great mother’, the guarantor of British fairness to ...”

“... of Milanese mercenaries he had stationed outside the city. As the Pazzi now discovered, Lorenzo may have been young, but he was as hardheaded a warrior as the mercenaries among whom he had grown up: the handsome brutes Galeazzo Maria Sforza of Milan and Sigismondo Malatesta of Rimini. For the next ten years, Lorenzo would contrive savage revenge on his ...”

“... flagship, ‘all the world never saw such a force as theirs.’ When it left Lisbon harbour on 28 May 1588, the Armada comprised 150 vessels, ranging from thousand-ton merchantmen to small felucca message boats. The mission, under the command of the duke of Medina Sidonia, was to get boots on the ground for an invasion of England. The fleet carried 18,973 ...”

“... hazards than Your Majesty.’ ‘Not so,’ said William. ‘I am where it is my duty to be; and I may without presumption commit my life to God’s keeping; but you …’At this instant, a cannonball from the ramparts laid Godfrey dead at the king’s feet. Macaulay goes on to say that ‘it was not found, however, that the fear of being Godfreyed – such ...”

“... but he is stronger on narrative than on analysis, and I don’t think he really brings out what may be lurking in the mephitic swamp that he explores so well. Perhaps we might approach it by tracing two related but not interdependent trends: the rise of the mass media at the end of the 19th century and the decline of Parliament through the second half of ...”

“... at this (or any other) time,’ Burton notes. Marian had a remittance from her family; Bunting may have been helped by his mother (who joined them in Rapallo periodically; his father was dead); I don’t think there was much paid work involved. Bunting advances the perverse and implausible claim: ‘It seems as though Italy were the only climate in which I ...”

“... supervision, state torture has become so commonplace that Human Rights Watch recently concluded it may amount to a crime against humanity; all protest has been rendered effectively illegal, extrajudicial killings have soared and the number of political prisoners is believed to exceed sixty thousand. The government has censored hundreds of websites and drafted ...”

“... three-million dollar extravaganza held at a five-star hotel in Sun City, South Africa, in May 2013. Two hundred guests arrived from New Delhi on a chartered Airbus that was allowed to land at a nearby military airbase. Vega’s uncle Atul Gupta met the guests, who were taken to the resort without any passport or visa checks. One hundred and thirty ...”

“... the rest of us. Certain writers’ books get ‘fenced off by enthusiasts, and the casual reader may feel the need of credentials to read them’. Between 1956 and 1981 Mary Renault published eight novels set in ancient Greece that made her enormously, wildly popular. These days, though she’s never been out of print – this is the second reissue of her ...”

“... but not seen. It would have been much improved by a stronger sense of context, for while Brown may be largely lost to us as a knowable individual he is not entirely so. The few papers tell us something, and the circumstances of his life and work might be pieced together convincingly enough to describe in outline the qualities of the man who was able to ...”

“... In​ the early 1960s, David Hockney made a series of etchings inspired by the poems of Constantine Cavafy; he went to Egypt to discover the places Cavafy had drunk coffee and picked up lovers, but in the images it’s mainly Hockney’s own life and friends who figure. The etchings touch on rapture, and the frankness of their erotic pleasure at the sight and memory of boys in bed brought Cavafy to a new, wide readership ...”