“... end of a long winter hunger – ‘They are never curst but when they are hungry.’Shakespeare took his play from a novella by Robert Greene called Pandosto: or, The Triumph of Time. That subtitle may have been one of the things which mainly interested the dramatist in it, the other being the incestuous plot situation that drives its royal hero to his ...”

“... his performance. Steroids, for Bonds, were evidence not of the duplicity of the players who took them but of the hypocrisy of the baseball establishment that allowed them to get away with it. Bonds didn’t see McGwire’s inflated torso and equally inflated bank balance as a sign that baseball was cheating the public; rather, it was a sign that ...”

“... of normal life. Some of them had kept the newspaper cuttings describing their crimes, and they took pictures of one another, delighted with themselves, and would gather round to stare at the results. They would swap these pictures and pin them up and show them to any girls who were adventurous enough to come near the school.It would take me years to work ...”

“... these new places, in our Ayrshire, that spoke of the lives we were supposed one day to live. We took it for granted – much too early, as it turned out – that farming was a thing of the past, a thing people did before they were sophisticated like us. We never considered the stuff on our plates; we thought the school milk came on a lorry from ...”

“... in its exposure of the coming land-piracy that it seemed prophetic. It was efficiently directed by John MacKenzie, but the meat of the thing is in Barrie Keeffe’s script, his intimacy with tired ground that is about to be invaded, overwhelmed, rewritten. The advent of Margaret Thatcher was announced, as MacKenzie’s crime fable makes clear, by a slippery ...”

“... nature’s experiments, not as the culmination of nature’s design, echoes Berlin’s use of John Stuart Mill’s phrase ‘experiments in living’. (It also, of course, echoes Jefferson’s and Dewey’s use of the term ‘experiment’ to describe American democracy.) Like Berlin, I have been criticising the Platonic-Kantian attempt to do what Berlin ...”

“... up the steeply banked terraces. But noble as the site appears, it is not entirely benign. The poet John Lucas, in 92 Acharnon Street, reminds us that the old Olympic stadium is where ‘the Colonels assembled schoolchildren for parades so that they might learn to salute the Greek flag.’ Across a never relenting stream of traffic, motorbikes cascading from ...”

“... sampler of the high life. In both roles he fitted right in: he was, in his own words, John Bunyan’s ‘Mr Facing-both-ways’. He is intensely, almost insanely sociable. He discovered at an early age that being able to perform as a public speaker meant that ‘you need never dine or sleep alone.’ Early on, he mainly chose to sleep with boys ...”

“... Thomson’s narrator is Schwob/Cahun’s life partner, Suzanne Malherbe, born in 1892, who also took a name with a masculine implication, Marcel Moore. ‘Life partner’ seems a defensible term despite the element of euphemism, since it acknowledges an element of the familial in what was presumably a sexual relationship. The two knew each other in ...”

“... it in its true archaic shape and colour, not disguising its brutality’. Other reviewers took the opposite view, most vehement among them Ciaran Carson in The Honest Ulsterman. ‘It is as if he is saying, suffering like this is natural; these things have always happened; they happened then, they happen now, and that is sufficient ground for ...”

“... submit their coursework essays online as Word documents or PDFs. A few years ago, my department took the decision to run them automatically through the plagiarism-checking software Turnitin, which generates a percentage ‘score’ gauging an essay’s similarity to other digitally available documents, including journal articles, websites and all the other ...”

“... curving folds falling from belt to feet is Gothic – but, who knows, she might be less so if she took it off. She looks especially Gothic from above, but this cannot have been the view which we were expected to take and so Beck excludes shots looking down at her from his otherwise comprehensive photographic survey. The sweeping lines on the effigy of Ilaria ...”

“... Queen’s Counsel. Still, as long as it’s men in wigs ... The real problem is the one to which John Griffith and others have repeatedly called attention: that the judiciary comes very largely from a tranche of society whose values, culture, données and attitudes are homogeneous because they are socially and educationally inbred. Less attention has perhaps ...”

“... come and gone like shadows – Jim, the soccer star, had vanished, And Joe, the pensive one, and John, of calculus the gloomy hero … She flirted and procrastinated, toyed superficially with love, but in her heart awaited more. 16 Inevitably comes the day; He’s leaving, the ethereal friend: the bill is paid, exams are done with, the tennis racket in its ...”

“... of Linear Elamite. Afterwards, the keeper of the Middle East department at the British Museum, John Curtis, mentioned that he knew the Mahboubian family and could make an introduction. It took four years of cajoling but eventually the family agreed to withdraw the silver vessels from a safe deposit box for Desset to ...”