“... Inverness (in that order)’. But dedicated fieldwork by itself is not enough. Ungenerous as it may seem to carp at the fruits of so much painstaking scholarship, it has to be said that the Handbook rests on solider empirical than theoretical ground. The back cover suggests that it can be read as a guide to ‘upper-class’ life. But this is misleading. As ...”

“... generally takes into account the existence of parallel explanations or simultaneous pictures which may be equally valid: the fact that your model works does not make it the only possible model, nor does it ever cease to be a mere model. And secondly, one can’t help feeling that despite the brevity of the text there must be a much shorter and simpler way of ...”

“... But we have not managed anything new with two organs in three dimensions. The Roman vocabulary may therefore strike the English reader with a sense of déjà foutu. They had available, as we do, three levels of language: basic obscenities (five- and six-letter words); euphemisms and metaphors; medical terminology. The obscenities comprehend the ...”

“... one extreme to another, or trying to combine them in some paradoxical unity. For all I know, this may be one aspect of the ‘mysterious’ Russian soul. Since the Soviet Union closed its frontiers and put up its Iron Curtain, the behaviour of its citizens has become less and less predictable to Westerners. When the Western mind concludes that it’s ...”

“... a phenomenon deserving equal attention with Mussolini – a temperate judgment that the years may be thought to have vindicated. Art is at least as important as politics, whether in peace or war, and it is Pound’s intransigent conviction of this that brings out the philistine in others besides Peter Robinson. The statesman as artist – God knows it is ...”

“... in France during the first half of the 20th century, and also the extent to which Catholicism may be accommodated by any of these. Liberal, well-meaning Bertrand, of ‘an old but undistinguished’ Provencal family, with a manor house called St Théodore, has the Catholic faith in his blood and never dreams of renouncing any of its tenets, even when his ...”

“... contrasting as they do the disillusion of the sedentary, who wait in one place for what life may bring them, and the instinct of the migrant to get somewhere, anywhere, on his own feet. Bruce Chatwin’s latest book is about the idea of being a nomad. From his experiences in Australia he builds a case for fairly aimless wandering about, over large ...”

“... and phrase-books in rare cases of need. Cameras are customary, but not essential. Movie-cameras may be used, but natives sometimes resent them. Travel may now be impossible, but travel-writing is, perhaps for that reason, much prized. To be a travel-writer, one must explore a far-flung, outlandish place and report the ...”

“... or ‘because’ or even ‘if’ these things have been done, such and such an action may follow. Medieval theorists struggled to reconcile the ‘absolute’, or free and ungoverned, character of this distinctive construction with the regimen, or logical hierarchy, that ought to govern all syntax. The distinction matters. To take a famous ...”

“... mentioned. More glaring is the subtraction of party allegiances from local politics. There may be a recession, and ‘austerity measures imposed by the national government’, but there’s no reference to a coalition. Though it’s hard to imagine Howard Mollison being anything but as true-blue as the Roquefort sold in his shop, we don’t learn that ...”

“... filthy and tragic, the Life offers precious testimony to what ancient Greek popular narrative may have looked like. Kurke’s learned and humane book aims to excavate the vibrant popular tradition assumed by Aesop’s fables but now largely buried, and restore it to its place in cultural history. The largely elite literature that survives from ...”

“... east. As D.H. Lawrence wrote in his 1920 foreword to Women in Love, ‘the bitterness of the war may be taken for granted in the characters’: Lawrence’s novel says even less about war and warfare than Radiguet’s, but both books describe worlds of sex and violence that exist in the shadow of some greater cataclysm. As the narrator’s passion for Marthe ...”

“... the logic of ambition, division, decay and transformation that marks all such associations. This may seem obvious, but in some studies of the Brotherhood, it is depicted as sui generis because the ideas to which it adheres are Islamic. Others have characterised it as anti-systemic, opposed not only to representative government but to the very framework of ...”

“... letters and Einhard’s work, Nelson invokes an account of a saint’s miracle that she believes may record Charlemagne’s memory of losing a milk tooth in 755, and legislation in which she suggests his distinctive voice can be heard. Sources on Charlemagne are available in relative abundance for an early medieval figure, and Nelson quotes frequently from ...”

“... is some suspicion that his plea to funding Hamas, which cost him nothing in prison time, may have been a ruse to bolster the credibility of the prosecution case.) In return, he got seven and a half years instead of a potential life sentence, with a promise of further reductions if he continued to ‘co-operate’. His credibility was heavily ...”