“... English translations are also in print. The most commonly used is probably the 2004 version by John Fitch in the Loeb Classical Library. And another new translation is forthcoming from George Harrison. Each has different strengths. A lyric passage near the beginning of the play (21-25), in which Octavia laments her sad existence, is rendered most literally ...”

“... 21 soldiers in May, the lowest monthly figure since February 2004. But this doesn’t mean that John McCain is right to believe that given enough resolve the American army is on the road to victory. The reason for the drop in American casualties is that the Sunni Arab and Shia Arab communities in Iraq are fighting low-level civil wars. Part of the old ...”

“... States has a right to dictate what happens in Cuba can be traced as far back as the presidency of John Quincy Adams, when conventional wisdom held that Spain’s dominion over Cuba would inevitably give way to the island’s incorporation into the United States. ‘It’s in the neighbourhood’s interest that Cuba be free,’ Bush said when he introduced the ...”

“... enter Gaza to 34 – flour but not yeast, sugar but not coffee or tea. (‘Pasta,’ a querulous John Kerry asked senior Israeli officials after visiting Gaza, ‘what’s wrong with pasta?’) The shortages were biting, particularly after Israel destroyed or damaged tens of thousands of homes, schools and government buildings in its 22-day campaign last ...”

“... and remote much of the time, from medication or drink it seemed, she warmed finally to her task. John Fordham wrote in the Guardian about that night in his obituary of her: She spat out ‘My Way’ with a new ferocity over a racing hand-drum pulse, and ‘Pirate Jenny’, one of her most spine-tingling interpretations, with an edge that rolled back the ...”

“... society’s early members included David Cecil, Roger Fry, J.B.S. Haldane, Julian Huxley, Augustus John, Keynes, Shaw, St Loe Strachey, Ellen Terry and Wells. Stories appeared in the press about ‘the big cars, the women in striking hats, the well-known Bloomsbury figures making themselves conspicuous in the audience with their unconventional dress and loud ...”

“... like J.R. Ackerley’s father, or a conman like Tobias Wolff’s, or a bullying drunk like John Burnside’s, or a cold fish with a secret past like Germaine Greer’s, but a man with a hearing disability who tried to do the best by his family and whose one attempt at corporal punishment – a boot up his son’s backside – didn’t connect. With so ...”

“... ahead of the feeble neo-Palladianism of Quinlan Terry, let alone the heavy-handed Robert Adam, or John Simpson, or even his own brother, Rob Krier, also an architect. They take traditional elements and reassemble them in new and unfamiliar ways. They do not try to evoke things they are not. Their impact comes from their vigour and energy, the quality of the ...”

“... order’ – illegal enemy combatants – said by the former deputy assistant attorney general John Yoo (the author of two of the infamous legal memoranda on the legitimacy of torture) to be, yes, equivalent to pirates. We are back at the door wherein we came. It might be thought remarkable that a scholarly book, published as the US administration, in the ...”

“... had hardly heard of: Abaco in the Bahamas, Port Roseway in Nova Scotia, the mouth of the Saint John River on the Bay of Fundy. Newspapers were crammed with advertisements for last-minute sales and announcements about where loyalists were to board their ships. By the time the last British troops pulled out of New York in November 1783, 60,000 loyalists had ...”

“... the basis of expert advice. People are asked to be impartial and to refrain from clinging to what John Stuart Mill called ‘fractional truths’ – i.e. anything like a party line. More widespread still is the tendency to divide democracy into an electoral part, and something else. That something else can be a vigorous civil society, a lively public sphere ...”

“... floated their dreamlands far down the Danube and into the ‘bloodthirsty’ Balkans. Later, John Buchan, Lawrence Durrell, Evelyn Waugh and Malcolm Bradbury were among those who tried their hand at brutal, gaudy Balkan Ruritanias. Literary ‘othering’, as teachers tell their classes, is a way of confirming your own society as ‘normal’ by ...”

“... Rita Hayworth, Natalie Wood, Marlene Dietrich (drawn while posing, clearly), Simon Callow, John Gielgud and Ian McKellen. (My husband, David, incidentally, is related to Dietrich – on his mother’s side.) The screenwriters don’t include Dorothy Parker, although I’m fairly certain that Bachardy once did her portrait in black and ...”

“... Essex, a place with a long history of boat-building and Dionysiac boho revels: Francis Bacon, John Deakin and ‘Dicky’ Chopping, who made a fortune designing the dust jackets for James Bond books, all drank in the Rose & Crown on the quayside at Wivenhoe. Constable condensed the dominant myth of the English countryside in his painting of a haywain ...”

“... have descended on us. Their hoofbeats are still ringing in our ears.’ Three months later John Dos Passos reported in Life magazine that the Americans were ‘losing the victory in Europe’. Visiting Germany as an army journalist, he found that Europeans, ‘friend and foe alike, look you accusingly in the face and tell you how bitterly they are ...”