“... overemphasis on the importance of these discoveries. At several points it is hinted that they may be compared to the analysis of DNA. These are indeed the oldest fairly complete near-human remains, and Johanson and his colleagues are to be congratulated on finding them. They have worked hard in giving descriptions. But these bones do not reveal any new ...”

“... to preach Christian brotherhood with so much blood on their hands. The scale of their reverses may even have suggested a loss of heavenly favour. At Fulda on 3 May, fifteen hundred peasants were driven into a ditch to die. Within days, ten times that many failed to take the castle at Würzburg, even under the charismatic ...”

“... liberated on 4 June.Pina was killed as she ran after the truck containing Francesco. The murderer may have been a German or Italian soldier, or a member of the fascist militia, perhaps a police officer. The priest who was to officiate at the wedding cradled her head as she died. Francesco’s truck joined a convoy, which was ambushed by the resistance on the ...”

“... not known for their factual accuracy, and some of the anecdotes about Epictetus’ life in slavery may be embellishments. He seems to have walked with a limp in later life; perhaps this was caused by the enslaver’s mistreatment, or perhaps the story was intended to explain the limp. The chief outlines of his life are clear. He was born into slavery around ...”

“... carvers etc – are often well-researched lists of enforced trajectories and places, which too may own several names. By the time the longed-for destination, deemed safe, is reached it has been conquered. The streets now honour the victor’s generals and nephews. Boundaries are obliterated with a pompously heraldic rubber stamp; they are reinforced by ...”

“... with geometric motifs and stylised beasts, its border woven with the Medici ball device. The rug may have been an actual Medici possession, an expensive import that Cosimo wanted to show off, but it also alludes to the recent rapprochement between the Eastern and Western churches. The composition is built around a central recession, with the saints arranged ...”

“... of death. Because they are recognisably his themes, one is somehow reassured by them – which may be false comfort, for it’s not the same as understanding them. Here is a lone, elderly woman, soon to die but surviving for the time being in a cabin or hovel in a patch of stones. Sometimes she visits a nearby tomb, and comes under the scrutiny of 12 ...”

“... the public he professed to abhor: the great mass of the comfortable bourgeoisie. A further paradox may be that we cannot be sure whether this pleased or distressed him. If we take his frequent pronouncements at their face value (always a dangerous thing to do with him), then his artistic life must be accounted a complete failure – in his eyes. When he and ...”

“... himself with the British ruling caste that he also hated. But he turned out to have been right. It may be, too, that he understood that not all journalists are crusaders, but that even in the ‘higher’ reaches of the profession there are plenty who enjoy the frisson of betraying colleagues to further themselves, the shiver which accompanies writing copy ...”

“... they suspected he would dearly like to hear: moreover, as Mendel was an abbé, his assistants may have felt that there was an element of heresy in securing results other than those the Reverend Father was convinced were true. This is a subject on which the authors of the present book write amusingly. I do not suppose that personal advancement is a ...”

“... the issues they proposed, largely accounted for the reception of The Orators when it appeared in May 1932. By the end of that year, Louis MacNeice, Stephen Spender, Geoffrey Grigson, Michael Roberts, Bonamy Dobrée, John Hayward and Graham Greene had nominated Auden as the new voice. The six odes and the epilogue of The Orators, Greene said, justified ...”

“... on to speak of the ‘tough habits of mind of an active, penetrating thinker’ that the reader may begin to dissent. For ‘tough’, in any serious sense, Waugh was not; the impression is rather of a weak and wounded personality trying to outstare the world, to make up by the emphasis of his talk for what he lacks in inner coherence. No doubt the best ...”

“... to achieve’ or an indication of the ‘real opportunities you have regarding the life you may lead’. Issues of distribution, fairness and injustice are all ‘integral parts of the sense contemporaries had of capabilities and functionings’. The standards contemporaries could expect to enjoy were inevitably constrained by the war (not always ...”

“... paintings look staged. No matter how natural the girl pouring milk or the woman making lace may seem, the perfection of the surface, the exquisitely precise placing of the figure – so balanced, so quiet – betrays an organising hand. De Hooch, who never achieved that degree of control, has left more of the smell of reality. He seems to have had a ...”

“... Lumumba’s house, wanting to talk to her about ‘us’ as a massive riot is about to start, may seem like a good way of dramatising the gulf between the personal and the political, but all we feel is the lamentable poorness of his timing (a similarly adolescent solipsism creeps into many of his pronouncements on Inès). Equally, we immediately identify ...”