“... is that he eludes the art historians. With Vermeer expert knowledge doesn’t take you far. There may be symbolic significance in a discarded broom, say, or an unemptied laundry basket, but that is not the point of the painting. The paintings are about women and about loving women, as he must surely have done; most of the men in differing degrees ...”

“... to compromise that preceded the rise of the tougher political nationalism of today’s SNP. This may endear his book to defenders of Brownite or Cameronian union, but remains doubtful in a broader perspective. Clannic, tribal or (later) national human societies have always been essentially (and not accidentally) ‘outward-looking’, and necessarily aware ...”

“... with the US now cast in the role of sponsor? He doesn’t make it clear. The Iraqis themselves may of course – an understatement – have some say in all this, but Ricks tells his story from an exclusively American perspective. His preoccupation is with the US army and its officer corps. Representatives of other services, whether American or ...”

“... were far more Israeli acts of massacre than I had previously thought … In the months of April-May 1948, units of the Haganah were given operational orders that stated explicitly that they were to uproot the villagers, expel them, and destroy the villages themselves.’ In a number of Palestinian villages and towns the IDF carried out organised executions ...”

“... A few moments later, the visitor met Allen Dulles, the director of the CIA. ‘You, Mr Chairman, may have seen some of my intelligence reports from time to time,’ Dulles said, smiling. ‘I believe we get the same reports,’ Khrushchev replied. ‘And probably from the same people.’ ‘Maybe we should pool our efforts,’ Dulles said. The trip was ...”

“... pleasure of spotting the ghosts of once famous musicians flitting through the pages. Others may admire the young man’s assumption that conventional middle-class manners and pleasures are compatible with an uninterrupted dedication to the craft of music. Andrew Motion has said that what he wants from a biography is information about commonplace ...”

“... in his award-winning 1974 study, to be the one volume of the novel that a time-pressed reader may safely and entirely skip.8. The problems of Albertine are(from the narrator’s point of view)a) lyingb) lesbianism,and (from Albertine’s point of view)a) being imprisoned in the narrator’s house.9. Her bad taste in music, although several times remarked ...”

“... In May​ 2005, in the city of Andijan in eastern Uzbekistan, 23 local businessmen were on trial, accused of being Islamic extremists. There had been a peaceful protest outside the court building for the duration of the trial, but on 12 May the verdict was postponed. In the early hours of the following morning, armed supporters of the men stormed the prison where they were being held and took over the Hokimiat, the local government offices ...”

“... a reclusive billionaire called Pete Mercer, who suggests to O’Rourke that Israel and the Ulms may have ‘arranged an irredentism pact’: ‘What is an irredentism pact?’ ‘The return of land to those to whom it rightfully belongs.’ ‘They have a claim to the land?’ ‘As the first victims of genocide,’ he said. I was reminded of my ...”

“... Thucydides​ may well have been the first Western author to address himself to posterity. His forerunners – Homer and Herodotus, principally – show no awareness of a readership extending beyond their own time. But Thucydides called his work ‘a possession for eternity’, and spoke of the chaos of civil war as something ‘that is and always will be, as long as human nature remains the same ...”

“... in the story and causal in the plot, but this seems to be too elementary to get us far, and we may begin to see why Shklovsky, Tomashevsky and other Russian Formalists thought they needed the distinction between fabula and siuzhet. The difference is clear enough (too clear) if we think of real-life stories and plots. The fabula is what happens sequentially ...”

“... seem much less at ease with themselves than Titian’s sitters, and often appear melancholic. This may explain why he has been regarded as a very modern kind of painter, particularly adept at revealing his sitters’ inner lives. ‘Revealing’ is of course the wrong word to use, since we know nothing or next to nothing about any of their inner lives, but we ...”

“... has the feeling of having stumbled into an allegorical jigsaw: Constance, Vittorio, Matt, Clement, May. Some of the Englishness can be attributed to Hazzard’s interest in verse. ‘The Sack of Silence’ borrows its title from Auden, whose combination of rationality and originality with occasional compression makes him a sort of grand panjandrum to ...”

“... has expressed reservations about art critics, saying they are writers rather than artists and may not have any particular visual sensitivity. The same style of objection applies to books written by non-writers, and The Descent of Man is cheerfully ramshackle, both rambling and repetitive, raiding the press and the internet for surveys and snippets without ...”

“... space of a court or pitch. Some (golf, croquet) occupy an uncertain middle ground, which may be one of the reasons they are so tedious to watch. Others (football, rugby) started as the former and, as they were codified, became the latter. Eton Fives was first played against a wall at the bottom of the chapel steps at Eton College, a particular space ...”