“... of the natural world and derives from Pliny’s Natural History. The 15th-century mariner Michael of Rhodes, who wrote a treatise on shipbuilding as part of an ambitious composition documenting navigation, mathematics and astronomy, urges his reader not to begin anything on ‘the first Monday of April, because on this day Cain killed his ...”

“... in Manet’s earlier responses to her presence – cornered him into a frantic attack on his two-foot-high canvas, stabs and swipes of black pelting down on two other mainstays of his palette, a bright flesh tint and a cow-dung brown. Everything became ragged, snatched, hollow. MaryAnne Stevens, the curator, wants to take Manet on via the genre of the ...”

“... when it came to easel painting with intellectual credibility. Paint serious, paint big! An 11-foot-tall Democritus in Meditation (presently in Copenhagen) was unveiled, littered with skulls, moonstruck clouds and carefully researched antique curios. Ricciardi, the writer friend who had supplied the erudition, was plugged for further themes: ‘Now that ...”

“... one response to this dilemma, and is the response which the Oxford edition favours. But then, as Michael Warren argued in a 1977 article on ‘Repunctuation as Interpretation’, modern punctuation ‘has rhetorical implications, and its intrusion inevitably affects the phrasing and, especially for the actor, the intonation of the speech; the most innocent ...”

“... Where once its politics were leftish, its stance investigative, and its key influence Paul Foot, now its politics are rightish, its stance prurient, and its key figures Nigel Dempster, Peter McKay and Auberon Waugh. The radical lampoon has become required reading on the magazine syllabus of every Sloane Ranger. Moreover, the Eye, that fearless exposer ...”

“... inscribed with their names as well as Nixon’s: ‘Here Men from the planet Earth first set foot upon the Moon, July 1969 AD. We came in peace for all mankind.’ And when Nixon flew out to the aircraft carrier which plucked them from the Pacific, he announced: ‘This is the greatest week in the history of the world since the Creation.’ The ...”

“... explicitly answer is why the Normans won. It wasn’t, he shows, a victory for horse over foot, as traditional military commentators have supposed. William of Poitiers and the tapestry may suggest that, but they were speaking to a military and social elite that fought in the saddle. French cavalry is no more likely to have been able to override or ...”

“... body, ‘viz. the uterus & kidneys with one breast under the head, the other breast by the right foot, the liver between the feet, the intestines by the right side’, and so on. The heart was missing, however: ‘the pericardium was open below & the heart absent.’ It may have been burned in the fireplace, which bore evidence of a ‘fire so large as to ...”

“... received a physical deferment from the draft during the Vietnam War because of a problem with his foot, although he can no longer remember which foot. He was a football, squash and tennis player at the time.)African Americans Trump: ‘I have a great relationship with the blacks.’Muslim Americans Trump: ‘They’re ...”

“... Stortford, the market town where Rhodes grew up and where his father served as vicar of St Michael’s Church. Storey, whose grip on Victorian society is a little weak, sees Rhodes as insecure about his status. He was in fact proud to belong to the middling thrusters who amassed capital, joined professions and garrisoned the expansion of the British ...”

“... a single, dreadful act that gives them the excuse they need to gun the engines of oppression. Paul Foot London All I have to offer, in this distracted time, are stray thoughts and overheard lines. First, from my 14-year-old son, after several days of bluster about ‘righteous’ war: ‘“Evil” is what you talk about when you can’t explain what ...”

“... the Phoenician alphabet, Champollion and Egyptian hieroglyphs, Magnus Celsius and Staveless Runes, Michael Ventris and Linear B, Edward Hincks and Akkadian cuneiform, Yuri Knorozov and Maya glyphs. These were undeniable intellectual achievements. They were also endeavours tinged with madness. How else could anyone persist with such fiendishly difficult ...”

“... birthday, was announced on an early page as occupying ‘that much disputed territory between five foot six and five foot seven’. The low-key phrasing, the wry tone – this seemed to promise that rare thing in Amis’s fiction, a mirror with a low distortion factor. But then one of Keith’s romantic competitors is ...”

“... fifth visit since last summer, soon – or soon enough – I may be back for good. There’s a ten-foot tall bright green Statue of Liberty in front of a bungalow with a giant sunporch further down the Gweebarra River: it proclaims a returned Yank who has made his pile. His over-the-top – ‘I’ve made it and I’ve made it back’ – boastfulness is a ...”

“... beyond the limits of permissible displeasure. And so, in his own way, does the Austrian filmmaker Michael Haneke. Funny Games (1997) is a violent melodrama about a respectable family set upon by nasty criminals, much as in The Desperate Hours (1955) or Cape Fear (1962). (Both films were remade in the 1990s, by ...”