“... sinfulness, until Jesus finally shows mercy and lets her in. In Fables, Ancient and Modern (1700), John Dryden rendered ‘The Wife of Bath’s Tale’ in contemporary English, ‘not daring … to adventure on her prologue, because ’tis too licentious’. Voltaire took the opposite approach: when he reworked Dryden’s version in the 1760s, he made it even ...”

“... many Enlightenment scientists who thought that nature could be improved, but only if its complex laws were understood and obeyed. Too much cultivation, or cultivation of the wrong kind, could easily disrupt the water and nitrogen cycles that naturalists and agronomists were only just beginning to understand. Attention to nature didn’t always serve ...”

“... Hannah, their liaison would probably not have taken place before the repeal of the racial purity laws; Sonny’s respect for party discipline would have seen to that. The story of a political campaigner whose life is torn apart by a relationship with a white woman has some apparent topicality in contemporary South Africa. The writing of My Son’s Story must ...”

“... not the work of one who believes that the critic ought to turn personal impressions into general laws’ and, true enough, a year earlier – in Portraits – he had rapturously hymned Oxford’s Walter Raleigh as ‘the most spirited of professorial critics’. Even so, it was evident that for Leavis the real crime of this powerful weekly ‘critic’ was ...”

“... like the dreadful Vodi, despoilers of life, who work for Nelly, the witch with pointed teeth, in John Braine’s best novel, The Vodi, which appeared in 1959. Such demonic fantasies are quite common, I think, when young men are locked in a long-running conversation in, say, barrack-rooms or hospital wards. In Pinter’s case, the fantasy of ‘the ...”

“... disaster, had merely highlighted the entirely human disaster of a town which, by the laws of motion of late American capitalism, had long ceased to provide affordable housing for the people from whose labour the wealth of the town derives. When the tremors stopped, people saw that the earthquake had posed more strongly than ever the ...”

“... would resuscitate the tradition of the Ottoman Empire; the occasional imposition of religious laws), but these were dismissed as small stains that should not be allowed to taint the overall picture. Then the Taksim Square protests exploded. Everyone knows that the planned transformation of a park that borders on Taksim Square in central Istanbul into a ...”

“... for popular biography, and Marozzi’s book follows works by Harold Lamb, Hilda Hookham and John Ure. History writing at this level seeks to provide us with vivid pictures of how things must have been and even, at times, to allow us to enter the minds of the protagonists. Marozzi opens with an account of Tamerlane on the eve of the Battle of Ankara ...”

“... heating and nylon coverings protecting protesters from the rain. In contrast to the many zoning laws or ‘authorised assembly areas’ (a term used in Canberra), which suggest that the public is seen as a threat, Price’s design made clear to demonstrators that they were welcome.Getting close to government buildings can be a crucial factor in ensuring the ...”

“... sought (and gained) alliance with him, establishing an unprecedented network of foster-sons and in-laws, from Scandinavia to the Alps. He was well known as a collector of relics and religious texts and as a generous patron of churches, clerics and monasteries. His is the first manuscript portrait of a ruler to survive in England, showing an offering he made to ...”

“... when learning to fly, the ego’s ready ‘understanding’ of, and acquiescence in, the laws of the dream world, and the ludicrous air of explanatory zeal with which we emerge from our dreams, bearing their marvellous secrets – Kafka has caught these beautifully. ‘We live as we dream – alone.’ Conrad’s sombre aphorism earns its place ...”

“... Cruickshank, Rowlandson and Dent; and portrayed by Romney, Beechey, Hoppner, Matthew Peters and John Russell. Nor has she been entirely forgotten by posterity. To be sure, she was not even mentioned by name in Percy Fitzgerald’s two-volume life of King William IV, published in 1884. But she merited an entry in the Dictionary of National Biography, there ...”

“... as he lay on his back in mid-Thames. There seemed no limit to man’s ability to defy the natural laws. It was not essential to limit the number of wheels to two, but tricycles and quadricycles were heavy going. A fetching illustration by George Cruikshank, dated 1819, shows two young women, each mounted on a Draisine-type Female Accelerator, taking grateful ...”

“... public burthens lightened, economy seated as it were upon a rock, the gordian knot of the poor laws not cut but untied – all by a simple idea in architecture’ Not just prisons but schools, madhouses, hospitals, reformatories and workhouses – all were erected in the sanguine faith that for every problem there was an institutional panacea. Indeed, to ...”

“... accurate reading, this was the moment. The exhibition might well have illustrated the complex laws of exchange, but transformation, purification and sacrifice were the big anthropological themes of the late 1930s. In the exhibition grounds, Albert Speer’s Fascist pavilion kept company with its florid Soviet counterpart. Guernica was on display in the ...”