“... mind has blundered: ‘nadir to nadir’, riches to rags; in the temple of order decapitated stone figures struck from niches; mobbed cattle with their drool and ordure; at their hooves dogs. So what do you make of that? Salamis was the famous naval battle at which the Greeks defeated the Persians; but that won’t help with the phrase ‘Irish ...”

“... deception’. Improvising on characters from The Tempest in another great essay, this one about Robert Frost, Auden allocated the first of these kinds of poetry to the spritely Ariel, the second to the worldly Prospero, and suggested that every poet – meaning himself – contained some mixture of the two. But they are evidently two very different sorts of ...”

“... Moorhouse’s book on the Pilgrimage of Grace and have reached the point in October 1536 when Robert Aske and the huge rebel host are at Doncaster waiting to move south, virtually unopposed. It’s a campaign that would surely have changed the course of history and might even have deposed Henry VIII, though this was not the rebels’ aim. They ...”

“... and of a much more rigorous bent. Durkheim’s study of suicide, for instance, a foundation-stone of modern sociology, couldn’t be further from Burckhardt’s treatment of the same phenomenon among the Greeks, although it appeared in the year of Burckhardt’s death. Durkheim produces a taxonomy of self-killing, distinguishing positive and negative ...”

“... and wrong that she had from her family and her time as a New Deal employee. And this model, set in stone and rubble, involved an unassailable loyalty to la causa. The disagreement, which was over Homage to Catalonia, was never properly stated, since Martha liked to get her retaliation in first. Maybe it was a disagreement over journalism. For that reason and ...”

“... in the same year, his body man Reggie Love points out an image of a man’s face carved in the stone: ‘Not the profile typical of hieroglyphics but a straight-on head shot. A long, oval face. Prominent ears sticking out like handles. A cartoon of me, somehow forged in antiquity.’ They have a good laugh about it, but Obama is not smiling on the ...”

“... ethics survive Auschwitz’, shaken, challenged to the core, ‘but intact’, is the subject of Robert Gordon’s superb book. Its thesis is that very early in his career Levi moved beyond the language of testimony to the ‘language of ethics’, a ‘flexible, sensitive, intelligent language’ that extends his work on the death camps into ‘a ...”

“... him to various other forms of secrecy’. He was to become a government spy when Robert Harley was Lord High Treasurer (effectively Prime Minister) and he uses the word ‘secret’ obsessively in Crusoe (it occurs five times on one page). Novak sees his experience of prison and the survival strategies to which it led as crucial to his ...”

“... army, which was unhappy with the deal and thought it could get better terms. The next president, Robert Kocharyan, was more of a hardliner and refused to surrender the occupied provinces. For the Armenians, there was no way of legalising the status of the occupied regions, and they didn’t have the population required to settle the area. Yet they held on to ...”

“... losing face, being deep or superficial – get brought back weirdly to life.) The historian Robert Stradling pointed out some time ago that during the 44 years of Philip’s reign there was not a single day of peace; and most of the wars were far from being triumphs. This may be relevant.We might compare the lost face of Mars with that in another ...”

“... suggests that these actions were hardly likely to be very perverse. Battestin cites Lawrence Stone to the effect that in crowded country households in the 18th century, some intimacies between siblings which we might now think precocious were freely permitted and ‘even, in some families, a source of amusement’. In that context, the disclosure that ...”

“... has few, if any, rivals. Old Babylonia, tribal Africa, archaic Greece, Pre-Columban America, Stone Age Melanesia, Classical Rome, Dark Age Lombardy, Medieval Japan, Imperial China, feudal Poland, republican Venice, caliphal Islam, absolutist France, industrial Britain, revolutionary Mexico, Stalinist Russia, populist Argentina, social-democratic ...”

“... will so govern contrasting predicates as to reflect the tragi-comedy of the human condition. Thus Robert Burton (‘Democritus Junior’), the sad creator of the great Anatomy of Melancholy, is commemorated (1639) in the Cathedral at Christ Church, Oxford:         PAUCIS NOTUS   PAUCIORIBUS IGNOTUS                HIC JACET ...”

“... later Sartre’s secretary, shared his anger at a student protest in support of the Fascist writer Robert Brasillach, on trial for collaboration. (That Brasillach had once been a student at Louis-le-Grand counted more with their classmates than his anti-semitism.) Lanzmann and Cau formed a groupuscule with the future novelists Michel Tournier and Michel ...”

“... fighting to the last bullet to defend Hitler in his bunker, could emerge as best choice for the Robert Schuman Prize for services to European unity.* Why should European justice too not let bygones be bygones? More generally, appointments to the court had little or nothing to do with juridical qualifications. Nearly all were political. The Belgian judge was ...”