“... side or not. Anyone hoping for a comprehensive reappraisal of the 17th-century literary canon may be disappointed, too. According to Kerrigan, the historicising tendency in recent literary scholarship ‘has opened up issues that cannot be probed in other ways and equipped us more fully to make judgments about the value of texts’. Such judgments are ...”

“... they were of this opinion. They had faith in God in the sense that I have faith in you. They may well have been mistaken in their view; but they were not mistaken because their scientific hypothesis was unsound.Dawkins speaks scoffingly of a personal God, as though it were entirely obvious exactly what this might mean. He seems to imagine God, if not ...”

“... the painting in 1906, what they bought was The Woman in the Green Dress. The woman in the picture may still have resembled Camille, but she had become, in Monet’s words, ‘merely a Parisian figure of that time’. Such vanishing acts are hardly unusual in the history of painting. ‘I had not the least desire my model should be discoverable in my ...”

“... genre paintings of the Dutch Golden Age for their realistic representation of everyday life, we may be responding as much to the spell of the 19th century as to the artistry of the 17th. It was in the 19th century that ‘realism’ began to be used as a description of such images, and one of the earliest uses of the French term in an aesthetic sense comes ...”

“... as on judges who have to decide upcoming cases in the knowledge of the journalistic abuse that may await them if they decide one way rather than the other. The European Convention on Human Rights, with its qualified guarantee of free expression, makes contempt of court a far less intimidating weapon than it once was; but it is just conceivable that the ...”

“... of Hizbollah (which was to play the major role in finally driving the Israelis out of Lebanon in May 2000). Faced with the prospect of Israeli vassalage after Sharon’s Army had in effect brought about his election, Gemayel seems to have demurred and was assassinated on 14 September. Israeli troops occupied Beirut, supposedly to keep order, and two days ...”

“... to withdraw his trust from the ideas he has picked up over the years from his senses. They may not be perfectly systematic or ideally precise, and he knows they have sometimes misled him; but he sees no point in supposing that his entire experience of the world might be shot through with vanity and delusion. He tries to reassure himself by recalling a ...”

“... remarking: ‘I tell you all this because in England, by some kind mistake his squabbles may be set down to me.’ Polidori, meanwhile, weeping with rage and fantasising revenge against the provocatively hatted officer and the governor, flounced off to find himself new patients, who promptly died. ‘Dr Polidori has, just now, no more ...”

“... eyes and listen to the music (remarkable by any standards) but not to read the supertitles. That may be the best advice when all is said and done, but it wouldn’t have pleased Wagner. His commitment to opera as drama was vehement and frequently announced. (In his essays, Wagner was the kind of writer who never says anything once.) And, for better or ...”

“... Palestine, a third of Palestine’s Arabs had been evicted before the Arab states invaded in May 1948. Abba Eban, Israel’s representative at the UN, nonetheless told the General Assembly in 1957 that ‘the responsibility of the Arab governments is threefold. Theirs is the initiative for its creation. Theirs is the onus for its endurance. Above all ...”

“... with the solipsism and literary penis-wagging of Updike’s generation of privileged males. Updike may have been praised for his missionary work on behalf of the Sexual Revolution in Couples, Marry Me and other tales from the commuter line, but the generation that followed were the children of divorce – the collateral damage of those adulterous games of ...”

“... level, to contain and control the vivid, traumatic happenings that originate their plots. They may be about secrets but they are themselves highly secretive. McEwan is addicted to the withholding of narrative information, the hoarding of surprises, the deferral of revelations; this manipulation of secrecy, apart from its obvious desire to keep the reader ...”

“... Inspired provocateurs during May 1968 in Paris, the Situationists are now the stuff of legend: one of those rare avant-gardes whose art and politics were not only radical but also forged together in radical fashion. Yet, as these early letters of the young Guy Debord, the leader of the group, make clear, they were the stuff of legend from the start ...”

“... before the king, and let her cherish him, and let her lie in thy bosom, that my lord the king may get heat. Her name was Abishag. She was of the tribe of Issachar, from the village of Shunem, and, for that reason, was known as a Shunammite. The writer of the Book of Kings is at pains to tell us that David did not, so to speak, ‘have sexual relations ...”

“... Algiers, where he was talking up bilateral relations in the event of his winning the presidency in May. He also said: ‘Colonisation is a part of French history. It is a crime, a crime against humanity … it belongs to a past that we must face up to, while offering an apology to the people who were on the receiving end.’ His remarks caused a furore in ...”