“... the US Army and the Coalition Provisional Authority, as the occupation administration is called. Paul Bremer, the head of the CPA, has his headquarters in the enormous Republican Palace beside the Tigris, where he and his staff live in an isolation comparable to Saddam’s. Then, in the mid-1990s, Saddam began to build enormous mosques, the largest of ...”

“... theatrical in character, not to say camp’. Pevsner agreed: ‘very pretty’. It was the work of Paul Paget and John Seely, Lord Mottistone. In spirit, if not detail, it is heir to Colen Campbell’s Ebberston Hall near Scarborough: sprightly and miles away from Office of Works Georgian, RAF Neo-Georgian, War Office Georgian.Perhaps the Architecture of the ...”

“... the same ardour as ever in study, and the same gaiety in company. I consider, besides, that a man of 65, by dying, cuts off only a few years of infirmities.’ If he could choose to live a period of his life over again he might choose this one, the last. For Hume, nothing more needed to be said about waiting for death, a subject that we moderns have ...”

“... sock and a strikingly nonchalant slouch leans against a rugged wall beneath a sign saying ‘rue de Genets’. Specificity of place and texture is admirably juxtaposed with formal elegance in these images, which consistently make an analogy between the city wall and the plain surface of the paper on which they appear.Maar’s portraits of members of the ...”

“... neatness of design. Giles Fox, as the novel’s retrospect finds him, was once a fulfilled man – someone who could have represented the happy ending of some other story. He is a librarian and a scholar (his ‘period’ is ‘somewhere between 1213 and 1215’), and the best efforts of his intellectual maturity have been happily applied to editing a ...”

“... of Horace Vernet’s Mazeppa, to see that there is more than nice observation of weather in Paul Huet’s picture of a lonely rider, Storm at the End of the Day.Dumas’s novel mixes operatic themes with the odd sourly realistic vignette. The exhibition shows how two different visual cultures produced what lives side by side in the novel: scenes of ...”

“... in the lives of the minor characters in Dr Zhivago is that they lived in the times of the great man; they could bear witness to the mystery and miracle of his existence. In his excellent book on the Russian Revolutionary novel Richard Freeborn discusses the many forerunners of Dr Zhivago, and implies, what is certainly the case, that the novels which had ...”

“... feels that the 17th-century Dutch walls in Vermeer’s paintings are ‘as old as Egypt’. As a man Vermeer is little more to us than a signature. There is virtually no evidence for his artistic training, his character, or even his appearance, and his modest oeuvre – 35 canvases, not counting a couple of debatably attributed pieces – was unknown to the ...”

“... of Europe, the Ritters, Cabelleros and Chevaliers, so it marked the surnames of the ordinary man: the Smiths, Grooms, Carters, Wheelers, Wainwrights, Cartwrights, Jaggers, Packers and Sadlers.The rise of the steam engine actually increased the dependence on equine power. In the US, the number of horses and mules grew sixfold, to nearly 27.5 ...”

“... branch of science, his allusions from the literatures of a dozen languages; to understand him, a man must be a master of German indeed, spoken as well as written, and must know something of German life too.Hyndman apparently lacked any such talents. But what could one expect of a man who possessed only ‘a passable ...”

“... the Austrians, including Karl Popper and Otto Neurath (not to mention Wittgenstein), and later got Paul Feyerabend from Vienna and Imre Lakatos from Budapest. The United States got the Germans, including Rudolf Carnap and Hans Reichenbach. The famous Vienna Circle, or Wiener Kreis, was established by Moritz Schlick, a German, who brought other Germans to ...”

“... deeply flawed’), he told her he was ‘an argumentative, perpetually horny, middle-aged man’. (He’s 48.) Leathers said they had phone sex, used the word ‘love’ and discussed procuring a Chicago condo for a romp. (They never did meet in person.) She cast herself as a spurned victim at first but quickly gave that up. Now she just cashes ...”

“... Paul Auster​ ’s new novel, 4321, is a lightly edited two-inch-thick Bildungsroman divided into four timelines, each a possible iteration of a single character’s life. That character is born at the end of a prologue consisting mostly of family prehistory: Russian Jews emigrate to New York and bear a child, Stanley; Stanley marries comely Rose, and they beget our protagonist, Archie Ferguson ...”

“... warmed to him. His eccentricity became a disguise, an armour of winking and raillerie concealing a man nobody knew.His upbringing didn’t dispose him to fit in. He was born in May 1866 in Honfleur, to a French father and an English mother who insisted that he was baptised into the Anglican Church. This turned out to be a false start. His father, Alfred, when ...”

“... where the ruthless, calculating woman, in the shape of Jane Greer, may also really care for the man she is framing and using, a very young Robert Mitchum. This complexity is not going to do her any good, because both the plot and Mitchum believe in the simpler story of her murderous guile. But we are left wondering if there isn’t some sort of baffled ...”