“... a question of Mrs Thatcher’s notorious distinction between wets and dries: Conservative wets may be in favour of strong central government, but their main concern is with realising their vision of one nation, and with the obligation – albeit paternalistic – of the upper classes to protect the interests of the lower. Mrs Thatcher’s conservatism is ...”

“... the ghoulish procedure of Jodie Foster’s autopsy scene in The Silence of the Lambs. In fact, it may be that the Mary Rogers case is where scenes like that originated; Srebnick writes that the Mary Rogers mystery marked ‘the point at which the saga of violent female death became a critical, even defining, aspect of modern urban culture’. The queasy ...”

“... cultural meanings the Queen could not have consciously foretold’. However impatient the public may eventually have become with the Queen’s seclusion, her insistence on keeping Albert figuratively alive had, among other effects, the unintended one of reassuring her subjects that she was not about to play the amorous widow. As Munich wittily observes of ...”

“... as well as to indicate the difficulties in the way of what remains to be done, and how these may best be tackled. ‘The task in fairness discourse is not to achieve quick, temporary relief ... but a grander objective. Step by step, slowly, we want to bring to the global agenda a heightened interest in making the expanding universe of international law ...”

“... can’t avoid technical questions, and readers new to the complex problems of Shakespearean texts may find some parts hard going, but Jones avoids all temptation to be impressively professional and bejargoned; and his book is indeed so courteously written, so curiously intimate in manner and so engagingly clear and resourceful in argument, that anybody with a ...”

“... looter, then visiting Shanghai when it is liberated and losing his Parker pen to a pickpocket. We may wonder about the more serious effect of losing his first two wives. One was a ‘rare beauty’ who died of puerperal fever, another abandoned him when he was attacked in an early factional struggle. Were these also occasions when the little man suffered in ...”

“... only as a first novel. As a novel, of course, it must be assessed, no matter what adjectives it may have picked up from the papers. It tells the story, then, of two English girls, aged seven and five, whose mother took them on the hippy trail to Morocco in the Sixties. The woman – ‘Mum’, as she is called with inaccurate cosiness’ – is calmly ...”

“... with slices of apple and Americans who seek out little bottles of ‘Italian’ olive oil which may well have originated in Spain. In Lucca, a producer comes across a gaggle of amateur aficionados sampling on her farm, gargling and slurping and spitting on her floor as if going through the rituals of some dark Satanic cult. In Tuscany, they want to be ...”

“... married and so, unfortunately, always carries a hateful piece of her husband around with her. He may be a bit of a bully or a coward (the character is fleshed out just enough for us to find him slightly repellent), but in essence he’s only an odious narrative impediment, someone who just keeps getting in the way. Doon, for example, is divorced but still ...”

“... recognises, is that they often can’t be securely dated, so mentions of ‘King Antigonus’ may refer not to Gonatas but to his homonymous grandfather or grandson. The evidence is ambiguous, but Antigonus was probably given cult worship in Greece, an honour that was becoming common for dynastic kings. Whether he fostered such cults himself is harder to ...”

“... and reality doesn’t resist the renaming. The imagination and reality are often at odds, and it may even seem natural to take the difference between thinking of doing something and actually doing it as a sort of paradigm for the contrast. That certainly tidies things up. But in many cases, in relation to many actions, places, conditions, the imagination and ...”

“... at a time of dire economic crisis: that a blending of talents and policies from two parties may – just – offer possibilities that one-party rule would not. The more immediately alarming matter is what this coalition suggests about the homogeneity of the British political elite. Not just Clegg and Cameron, but even the likeliest Labour contender, Ed ...”

“... using components that are easy to source, even for a country under Western sanctions. Ukraine may have shot down more than two hundred, but according to Ukrainian intelligence Moscow has procured ten times as many and is expected to set up a local production line. Certainly Ukraine has an incentive to talk up the numbers, and to talk up the spectre of ...”

“... its integrity or its stability.’ Yet Xerxes’ military reputation had certainly suffered, which may in part explain his assassination in 465 in a palace coup led by his younger son. Despite these domestic upheavals, Achaemenid power remained undiminished. In 340, after a brutal campaign to subdue revolt in Egypt (largely carried out by Greek ...”

“... broken a long silence and become a poet of his time – the 1960s and 1970s – however much he may have insisted, as he did in the same poem, that he was ‘of the Thirties’. He had come home to the US, after a decade in flight from McCarthyism, and settled in Brooklyn. His days as an active member of the Communist Party had long since passed. He was ...”