“... shape his own posthumous fate, and that of others. Exile, then, did not crush Ovid as the emperor may have hoped, but Ovid went one better than simply escaping that outcome. Somehow he capitalises on his stock of experience to make exile work for him as a subject. The author of the Metamorphoses has undergone a total transformation, and this gives him an ...”

“... as he prophetically put it in Julius Caesar.’ However suspiciously convenient this structure may sound, and however paradoxical and question-begging Shapiro’s conclusion, it makes for a terrific read – there are few other biographical studies of Shakespeare as easily consumed at a single sitting – and 1599 displays a range of reading and inquiry ...”

“... opening passage. ‘A Vietnamese tourist!’ Mankell writes. ‘In Sweden in 1965! That may have happened once, at most.’ In Mankell’s books, the symbolic outsider is more likely to be from Africa or the former Soviet bloc, and the contrast is heightened by his predominantly rural settings. But Wallander and Martin Beck exist in a similar world ...”

“... a conscience can be uneasy bedfellows (though preferable to privilege without a conscience). They may give rise to dislocated feelings of guilt, which can lead to a perverse envy of the deprived – how lucky they are to be free of these feelings of guilt – or a conviction that privilege is, in fact, a form of deprivation, particularly deprivation of ...”

“... respects, the retail revolution of the Fin de Siècle shaped the conventions of modern shopping, may even have invented them. For a century at least, according to the marketing guru Paco Underhill in Why We Buy: The Science of Shopping, women have used shopping as ‘reward, bribe, pastime, an excuse to get out of the house, a way to trawl for potential ...”

“... envy [of us] is like ashes in the mouth.’ But isn’t the enjoyment of the envy others may have for us a lot more pleasant than ashes in the mouth? Praise that doesn’t cost the praise-giver anything to give lacks conviction. Doesn’t their envy of us imbue with sincerity whatever praise they might give us? Envy is no less sincere than ...”

“... cerebral inactivity. The first result of a morbid excess in this direction is headache, which may be taken to indicate that the brain is out of repair; this is followed by stupidity; should the disorder continue imbecility supervenes, ending occasionally in insanity.’ Thus, as brains get bigger and people get better, fecundity falls off, such that the ...”

“... and according to the law of the Medes and the Persians, around the world, whichever country they may be in, ultimately they do all belong to the same partnership. I hope that’s clear.’ Well of course it was clear. The companies were completely separate from each other but were bound together. This formula has been at the centre of a long legal action as ...”

“... and Vermeer the artist is an unusual tact. Here, the absence of any distinctive personal detail may constitute the evidence. Chevalier and Bailey agree that the Protestant-born Vermeer must have been a very diplomatic personality to share a house with his Catholic mother-in-law, a tough old widow who was estranged from her son and refused at first to ...”

“... intellectual mobile warfare that flared up in the mass media’s tiny time-segments.’ The novel may be sceptical about the good faith of realist writing, but it’s also nauseated by Wataya’s kind, cultural vampires, the new undead. Maintaining this balancing act doesn’t subdue its exuberance: it has the usual metafictional company – the truanting ...”

“... seen a play ‘where there was a man on a tree, and blood ran down’. For Shaw, such knowledge may have been worse than nothing. Christ represented on stage, as on crucifixes and rood-screens, was no better than an idol, an icon in the sense that has given rise to the term ‘iconoclast’: a fraudulent substitute for true religion that must be ...”

“... that of self-regard, which alerts us to the possibility that societies, no less than individuals, may be flattered by their own lofty sense of purpose when confronted by human misery. ‘The national consensus on American history as a history of progress,’ Sontag writes, ‘is a new setting for distressing photographs – one that focuses our attention on ...”

“... On 28 May 1919, the residents of Moscow woke to find that the walls of the Strastnoi convent had been daubed with what at first glance might have appeared to be crude blasphemous slogans. More attentive reading, however, revealed that this was poetry: ‘I sing and appeal: Lord, give birth to a calf!’ ‘Look at the fat thighs/Of this obscene wall ...”

“... Christi (a place once risibly proposed to tourists as ‘the Italy of America’), which from May to September has an average summer simmer index temperature of 100.1° F. Measured in terms of deaths and physical damage, there has been no more powerful natural force over the last few decades in the US than heatwaves. The National Climatic Data Center list ...”

“... Orleans, to Paris, where they confounded naturalists for several decades. A contemporary reader may guess, correctly, that the bones belonged to a species of animal that had long since ceased to exist – in fact, they came from the Mammut americanum, the American mastodon – but at the time such an imaginative leap would have been very difficult, because ...”