“... dei cipressi . . . Under the shade of cypresses, if urns are consoled by the grief of mourners, may the sleep of death be perhaps less harsh?’ The poem goes on to denounce the practice of burial in stinking churches, where venal priests terrify the credulous into paying for intercessionary prayers. Instead Foscolo conjures up an ideal of ...”

“... who proclaim that the battle is not yet lost, and that those who convert to austere green lives may yet save the planet and their souls. As well as the scientists and theologians (two imams, a rabbi and almost all flavours of Christian), there were Greenlanders on board. For a population only the size of Inverness, sprinkled round the edges of the biggest ...”

“... them. Second, associating the family with morality and the ‘Stalinist regime’ with its absence may give us a comfortable feeling that we are on the right side of history, but historians have a responsibility to try to explain what those alien beings from the past thought they were doing. This is not a matter of ‘tout comprendre, c’est tout ...”

“... were discovered more than a quarter of a century ago, and many are showing signs of exhaustion. In May, for example, the Mexican state oil company, Pemex, announced that output at Cantarell – the country’s biggest field – had declined by nearly 40 per cent since 2006. Similar problems are affecting some of Russia and Norway’s major fields. In the 2008 ...”

“... like Murderers carried an epigraph from Don DeLillo’s Mao II: ‘News, darker and darker news, may be the only narrative people need, and the shapers of this narrative are authors in their own right. To a certain extent their world has become our world, a place of extreme anger and danger.’ Born Yesterday, his new novel, is an attempt to bring to life ...”

“... and the rhythms of Irish speech, somewhat in the manner of J.M. Synge, and nowadays this style may sound archaic or affected. She is still remembered as the part author, with Yeats, of Cathleen ni Houlihan, a propagandist play of 1902 – a vehicle for Maud Gonne, who played Cathleen – that has not lost all its patriotic force. The old rows, chiefly over ...”

“... thinking, reality is seen as a complex system of correspondences in which given components may throw light on their counterparts or actually symbolise them. Leviticus, then, in Douglas’s view, is not in its deepest concerns a series of regulations for butchering sacrificial animals, purifying contaminated persons and substances, and keeping unfit ...”

“... genes thought to be the evolutionary innovations of vertebrates have more ancient origins. Animals may in some instances discard genes as they become more complex. It would appear that in order to gain a true understanding of the genetic make-up of human beings, we will need to study a far greater range of organisms. Leroi, however, believes that if we are to ...”

“... in 1939, when Auden and Isherwood and Pears and Britten fled to America to escape it. This claim may not be quite groundless but it probably underestimates the complexity of the emigrants’ motives. And perhaps, as Morley believes, the police and the judiciary had been gradually getting tougher on homosexuals ever since the persecution of Wilde in ...”

“... going in 1932 to Geneva to report on the League of Nations World Disarmament Conference. This may have seemed like an opportunity to remedy some major errors – or, if you chose like Kennedy so to call them, the injustices – of Versailles. Great things were hoped for, and Kennedy’s own country was playing the leading role – how amazing now to ...”

“... the US refuse to sell Taiwan the means of ‘deterrence’? There is money behind this, too, you may be sure. But it is the long-term consequence of a short-term policy of sowing dragon’s teeth. The Dame of Sark was never such a turbulent proxy. In the​ first week of March, China’s Finance Minister, Xiang Huaicheng, sent the new Bush Administration ...”

“... in which reconciliation has been attempted. They are linked by the idea that restitution may provide an effective model for their resolution (and the resolution of other historical conflicts). Preceded and followed by forays into the theory of restitution, the main text is divided into two parts. In Part One Barkan considers the aftermath of World ...”

“... it. She also admits to knowing the prisoners would be killed. They ‘all knew’. In doing so she may have displayed greater courage than her co-defendants, but her confessions also fail to strike the right note. ‘She admitted what was true and disputed what was not. Her arguments became more desperate and more vehement. She didn’t raise her voice, but ...”

“... best to be supportive. She was fond of her mother but found her more and more of a trial, and this may help explain why, in 1923, she announced her engagement to Antonio Origo, the natural son of a marchese. To her literary-minded friends it seemed an odd choice, for Origo, though socially polished and a charmer, was a very unbookish man, with an ambition to ...”

“... for dominance. Eventually, the English won out; that we know well enough. But what we may not fully appreciate, according to Hoffer, is the extent to which their winning depended on ‘sensory imperialism’. In short, they succeeded (in large part) by forcing their own pattern of sensory experience on their Indian counterparts. How, exactly, did ...”