“... Ray explained to his readers, comparison with the written entries will mean that ‘the bird may soon be found.’ Birkhead tells us that ‘subsequent authors revered Willughby and Ray’ for their system, and claims that it was in some ways superior to the one later devised by Linnaeus in the Systema Naturae. As a means of testing it, Birkhead takes ...”

“... has for nearly three millennia been imposed from outside – is not as controversial as it may sound. Historians of the Levant and North Africa have chipped away at the notion that the label ‘Phoenician’ is useful for talking about the experiences, beliefs, networks or practices of such a heterogeneous group of ancient people.Quinn’s contribution ...”

“... of Mr Love in Mr Hayter, Miss Joy casts against type, and finds happiness. Changing your name may be what restores you to yourself. Miss Joy is truly joyful in the end, by virtue of becoming Mrs Hayter. There is a romantic novel to be glimpsed in this stanza: how, we might ask, did Miss Joy part company with Mr Love? Did she only choose him, but not marry ...”

“... knees in prayer, attack the art or react sexually to it, however powerful our initial responses may be.The repression extends to what we allow ourselves to think about the history of images. Although museums now rarely describe non-Western art as ‘primitive’, it is still unusual to hear a European artwork’s original erotic, medical or miracle-working ...”

“... literary world, that their deaths are caviar for the general public (or ambrosia for the gods), may underlie a book such as this, but it sits uneasily beside the blatant kitschification of poetry (to which this book queasily may add). Some of the bizarrerie comes with the territory: the lock of hair and other personal ...”

“... man that ever ruled England’, but as Malcolm Vale points out in the preface to his new book, it may have been formative in other ways: for all his military success, Henry would fight only one more battle, and there was much more to this king than prowess in arms. The book, which Vale says is ‘not a biography’, has three broad aims. The first is to move ...”

“... Della is the furthest thing available to literature from a prostitute, whatever that thing may be. Jack, though fallen, is careful to free himself of base sexual intent. They share a love of poetry. Her presence beside him reminds him of Milton’s embracing angels: ‘total they mix, union of pure with pure.’ They sit through the night among the ...”

“... remembered.’ Like being in love, yoga tends to produce banalities, however transformational it may seem to the person doing it. Carrère describes what it does to the body, the way concave stretches to convex, weight transfers from one leg to the other ‘as slowly as possible, like pouring honey’. He tries to remain detached when observing himself, his ...”

“... he decided not on snow or lilies, but on ‘paper-white’. This association with cleanliness may help to explain why it was often invoked in medical recipes. One 15th-century charm to reduce fevers suggested writing nine apotropaic words on a piece of paper and eating a word each day (parchment wouldn’t have gone down so easily). More prosaically, it ...”

“... considers a tangle of clothes on the floor, brushing aside the thought that he may have just raped one of his students: ‘After the storm, he thinks: straight out of George Grosz.’ In Pasolini’s Porcile, the industrialist Herr Klotz lies in bed, worried he’s losing his son to left-wing radicalism. ‘The days of Grosz and Brecht are ...”

“... a fictional world of horror.The story involves a supernatural force called the Darkness, which may provide the secret of immortality if placated with enough blood. Its existence is known only to a group of ‘Initiates’ – the Order, whose members are overwhelmingly part of the ruling class. The Order needs mediums to access the Darkness, and it has ...”

“... what is perhaps the DNB’s chief pleasure: it leaves us to divine the ‘real story’ that may or may not lurk behind its polite graveside presentations. With the best-known entrants, we will very likely have – or soon be getting – some other, more unbuttoned narrative. For most, though, the DNB’s biography ...”

“... the US Administration did to Eden’s government three decades previously. The US position in 1989 may not have been as strong as its actions made it appear, but the difficulties faced by the Soviet Union could hardly be exaggerated. Most commentators were astonished by the speed of the collapse of its Eastern European empire. Within a matter of months, almost ...”

“... to make the running in a debate which was to lead to the White Paper on ‘Employment Policy’ of May 1944 – the one Mrs Thatcher used to carry about in her handbag. The Section’s opening paper focused on the counter-cyclical management of total demand, with the clear implication that in depressions the Budget should run into deficit, debt being repaid in ...”

“... see Auld Reekie,’ Stevenson wrote to his fellow Scottish novelist S.R. Crockett from Samoa in May 1893, eighteen months before his death: ‘I shall never set my foot upon the heather. Here I am until I die and here will I be buried.’ But, as he told another correspondent, his head was ‘filled with the blessed, beastly place [i.e. Scotland] all the ...”