“... in some transfigured form). The volume to hand, however, suggests 1) that the idea of the CD-ROM may be more subversive and exciting than its still impoverished reality, encaged in its plastic frame, and 2) that the ‘book’ may well be better exploded, if I can put it that way, by the stimulation and vigorous ...”

“... profession. Time has not decided the matter. A row of paintings by Copley, Hoppner and Opie may be dashing but you can tire of them before you are sated with Vigée Le Brun’s pretty frocks and bright eyes. And of these there is no shortage: she was prolific. She drove herself and sometimes she said she had spread herself too thin, but it is pretty ...”

“... an interpreter to a high military officer of a Warsaw Pact country, then watch it.’ On 31 May 1944, Major Frank Thompson, wearing the British uniform that should have protected him, was captured along with the Bulgarian Partisans to whom he was attached, near Likatova, north of Sofia, found guilty at a staged trial, and publicly shot on 5 June. His ...”

“... we now admire and dislike in Ingres was, on the whole, admired and disliked from the first. It may be some comfort to Ingres, in whatever houri-filled heaven he occupies, to know that no one today is as rude about him as some of his contemporaries were. This is partly because he worries us less. We know there was no need to feel anxious lest his official ...”

“... with it, would be a new way of getting under the skin of things.’ While such an undertaking may seem bizarre, a feeling for water is fundamental as well as easily overlooked: we came from it, we are largely made of it, it is as likely as not that wars will presently be fought over it, and rising sea levels, thanks to global warming, ...”

“... collegial government. The question why this should have been so also yields answers which may apply to many, even most cases. The most obvious explanation might seem to be pathological: the personal inadequacy of monarchs who were unfit for the burdens imposed on them by the lottery of inheritance and who could not manage without their mayors of the ...”

“... are not much use as a guide to the subject. Bohemia is a country of the mind, a flying island that may land anywhere and take off again just as quickly. No sooner have the upwardly mobile middle classes discovered it, in Greenwich Village or Montparnasse, than it is gone, vanishing on contact with gentrification. Conversely, it ...”

“... be squared with democratic ideals of political and civic equality? Before the Jubilee the dilemma may have looked insoluble. One proposal was that the Queen should slum it a bit more, perhaps through a spot of biking – the so-called Dutch model of monarchy. Further possibilities for down-marketing readily suggest themselves: the monarch could do something ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Henry James was a generous correspondent in more senses than one, but his fellow writers may have found some of the Master’s letters rather exasperating. ‘I read your current novel with pleasure,’ he wrote to William Dean Howells in 1880, ‘but I don’t think the subject fruitful, & I suspect that much of the public will agree with me ...”

“... from thirty years before. A third case from twenty years ago, in which a colleague of Rebus’s may have framed an innocent man, has been revived by media interest. And as the novel begins a man who works for an oil company is kidnapped, tied up, and plunges to his death on spiked railings outside a block of flats. Then Bible John himself – an oil man, we ...”

“... be ashamed. It was a mind which as yet had found few opportunities for action, but ‘as a dog may have its day’, so perhaps her time would come ‘to declare it in deeds’, rather than only in words. It was May 1549 and too early for Elizabeth even to imagine a significant political role for herself. These were ...”

“... when he died – you can hang on to the crucifixion – or turning 40. Take your pick. OK, there may have been a donkey, but that just means the story was not a fiction but a drama enacted according to the script the prophets had written; and his mother was a married woman not a parthenos – a married parthenos is a contradiction in terms. What’s ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”