“... many forms of prophecy and the ways ancients sought to explain it. The impression of incoherence may of course be a result of the ‘scattered and partial nature of the evidence’, to quote Michael Flower, and the difficulties of interpreting what does exist. The Oxford Handbook contains a whole section on the range of sources (material, literary and ...”

“... on 20 October. The situation is being watched nervously across Latin America: the Bolivian crisis may represent a tipping point for the region as a whole. The original momentum of the Pink Tide has ebbed away, and the battle underway now is over what will succeed it. The achievements of the Pink Tide governments have been impressive, but they have also had ...”

“... protected from discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation or gender identity. (Liberals may find Gorsuch’s approach to law less appealing when the court is faced with affirmative action cases.) But no one doubts that Gorsuch is on the right wing of the Republican Party, and there are no signs of his moving to the left. A court governed by ...”

“... in gear’. A character dies by autoerotic asphyxiation, aka ‘the old chokey-strokey’. You may find it silly, but, applied to the work’s more gruesome content – that’s what we’re here for, after all – this childlike language can be remarkably effective. It’s a rare day that goes by when I don’t think of King’s greatest, most ...”

“... as a ‘faux pas’, and ‘An Epistle from Mrs Bustle to Mrs Pad’, printed in the Times in May 1793, ends with the lines: ‘A projection much better, behind than before,/Because it make virgins now look like a ——.’ Rauser wants us to see this strange fad as part of the broader drive to transform women into living statues. Sir Gilbert ...”

“... gets the better of a male character (her fishing hook lodges itself in his earlobe). It has what may even turn out to be a happy ending.The overwhelming impression of Egerton’s stories, however, is that ‘there never was a marriage yet in which one was not a loser; and it is generally the more gifted half who has to pay the heavier toll.’ The women in ...”

“... two and three if you find yourself in difficulties.’ This tutorial tone, kept up throughout, may make some readers feel that he underestimates them. Certainly one keeps expecting to come upon the sort of informative illustrations that this theme, when popularised, conventionally needs: they would depict, say, a detail from Holman Hunt’s The Finding of ...”

“... Around​ 150,000 Dutch Jews were living in the Netherlands when Germany invaded on 10 May 1940. Over the next five years, 107,000 were rounded up and sent to concentration camps. After the war, only 5000 returned home, where they were often met with indifference, if not hostility. Some were presented with bills for unpaid taxes or found that their homes had been repossessed ...”

“... of answered prayer. What a joy to hear from Mr Beggs of a £1,000 gift for the pulpit. Hallelujah! May that pulpit be the storm centre of the great hurricane of revival. Oh for a tempest of power, a veritable cyclone of blessing, Lord, let it come! Eight years later, the preacher rose up in that enormous pulpit and waved a copy of a historical study which had ...”

“... diver after all’s Done, still held fast in the weeds’ snare below ... My sudden struggle may have dragged down some White lily from the air – and now the fishes come. Meyers argues that the 20-year-old Frost chose the Dismal Swamp because other poets had written about it, and that Frost intended only to make a dramatic point to Elinor by ...”

“... to the back of the head. The same fate awaited Isaac Babel, who was taken from Peredelkino in May 1939. There were others, less well known, but equals in the manner of their death. ston05_3618 GalleryHow Pasternak survived the necropolitics of the Stalin era was a mystery. ‘It is surprising that I remained whole during the Purges,’ he wrote in ...”

“... bestseller with staying power. ‘Curious to think that a slender little volume about lunacy may provide a meal ticket for my superannuated years,’ Styron muses in Selected Letters, edited by his widow with R. Blakeslee Gilpin. The irony of Styron’s career is that as a literary son of Faulkner, Wolfe and Hemingway, he expended massive energy and ...”

“... melt into a massive and expertly realised mise-en-scène. The French camouflage section at Amiens may have produced large-scale illusions, extending, as these volumes tell us, to the vast painting that was ‘raised suddenly on the crest of Messines in June 1917 to simulate an assault of 300 soldiers’, but Solomon now saw something bigger still. Peering at ...”

“... terms of what was typical for its time. A handful of nit-picking philosophers and pukka historians may have frowned their disapproval, but why should anyone care as long as the trade in periods and period styles was booming? Critics, sociologists and cultural commentators had a vested interest in the idea of history as a single time-line divided into distinct ...”

“... In fact, neoliberalism lives on precisely because it continuously reinvents itself. The IRA may be a first in the US, but Europe puts more money into climate solutions and China’s subsidies for its microchips industry are four times those of the US. The facts were less important, however, than the claim of novelty. Bidenism wanted to respond to ...”