“... or what remains of it, on display nearby, or the hobnailed boot from Vindolanda on Hadrian’s Wall. There’s a certain pathos to the solitary sock: it’s easy to imagine it being overlooked in the hubbub of striking camp and left behind when the legion marched on. But it turns out that’s just my ignorant fantasy, since there’s a pair of almost ...”

“... have not significantly decreased in most cases. In the US, Clinton’s blitz on welfare and pro-Wall Street policies produced a short-lived budget surplus by the close of his administration. In the UK, governments have run deficits in all but six years since 1979, and even before 2008, the trend was that they were gradually increasing. Indeed, the surge in ...”

“... Zarqawi’s abandoned headquarters, with a logo, ‘Al-Qaida Organisation’, drawn on the wall inside. In October 2005, another letter was released by the US military, ostensibly written by Osama bin Laden’s confederate Ayman al-Zawahiri and addressed to Zarqawi, offering strategic advice to ‘al-Qaida in Iraq’. It was never made entirely clear ...”

“... of elements gave inorganic chemistry its logic: the famous chart, which used to be posted on the wall of every chemistry laboratory like a sacred text, is as much map as matrix. Even today, in physiology laboratories, the brain is being anatomised in terms of the cortical areas responsible for one piece of sensory integration or another: a subtle mapping ...”

“... entangled (Partridge’s text is addressed not only to ‘Good Huswives’ but also to Richard Wistow, assistant to the Company of Barbers and Surgeons). According to Galenic humoural theory, health was a matter of balancing the black bile, yellow bile, blood and phlegm that swam through the body, and food was a crucial means of establishing this ...”

“... of recall or underdrawn his characters, McCourt’s books and manner are engaging. The historian Richard White describes his book as an ‘anti-memoir’. White, who teaches history at Stanford, has traced the story of another post-Independence immigrant – his mother. Sarah Walsh emigrated to the United States from County Kerry in 1936. When she was living ...”

“... in the Foreign Office and other politicians, all of whom he would have liked to put up against a wall’. He had expressed similar views, the Spaniard added, before he became Edward VIII. Urbach assembles plenty of evidence to demonstrate Edward’s pro-Nazi views and his advocacy of an Anglo-German alliance. Nobody should be surprised that he taught his ...”

“... but developed its own distinct identity as a province of its empire.’ Virgil would be delighted. Richard Hingley’s book deals with the troublesome process of uncovering Roman Britain. This is difficult territory. He explores how, between 1586 (the date of William Camden’s Britannia) and 1906 (when Francis Haverfield’s lecture on ‘The Romanisation of ...”

“... Taverner’, thus seems to have kept a pub in Ipswich, while his great-great-grandson, Richard Duke of Suffolk, nicknamed ‘Blanche Rose’, was accepted as King of England – but, alas, only by the French, and only till he was killed in battle at Pavia. There is an irony, on which Derek Pearsall ends his book, in the extirpation of the Chaucer ...”

“... Duras, Ballard, Virilio and above all Vonnegut. There are quotations from Vonnegut on the wall outside the show’s entrance, a copy of Slaughterhouse 5 is displayed in the first room, and Richard Peter’s photograph of a statue overlooking the firebombed cityscape of Dresden is on the front cover of the ...”

“... the floor with the camera overhead, it is hard not to read it as if they were stapled halfway up a wall, straining to jump down. The Barbican’s capaciously enjoyable exhibition (until 14 February) hums with that same optimistic vitality. The Eameses’ many short films were, Charles said, ‘attempts to get across an idea’. Toy Trains illustrates several ...”

“... indicating deaths. Snow found out why: the brewers drank beer. The new building, designed by the Richard Rogers Partnership, is like a ready-to-wear design from a couture house whose more extravagant exploits are undertaken for private clients: it’s not a bespoke building, and although it’s been reported that the tenants will be the design studio of the ...”

“... this me? The fields are mined and the night is long; Stick with me when the shooting starts. Richard Murphy is not a reckless poet. Those who rate him surely rate him much too highly. Ted Hughes compliments him with the anti-reckless word ‘classical’ and with ‘the gift of epic objectivity’, and Seamus Heaney praises his ‘poised and appeased ...”

“... Nazi or Marxist enemies of liberalism refuted, by driving the latter up against an argumentative wall – forcing them to admit that liberal freedom has a ‘moral privilege’ which their own values lacked. From the point of view I have been commending, any attempt to drive one’s opponent up against a wall in this way ...”

“... sites.) The (Mis)behaviour of Markets, jointly written by Mandelbrot and a financial journalist, Richard Hudson, covers a much less well-known aspect of his work, his contributions to economics. At their core is an apparently esoteric issue that nevertheless has fundamental practical ramifications, intertwined as it is with the fate of pensions and of ...”