“... in A Letter to the Dead – and trained to be a florist in the 1930s with Constance Spry. One may not think of Wales, with its ‘rain and interminable mist’, as having a particularly vibrant palette, but Roberts’s radiant images show otherwise. Light infuses her work, sometimes to an otherworldly degree. She wrote an essay on Welsh architecture in ...”

“... question of Palestine was mentioned, an almost tangible silence spread across the room.In early May, the Egyptian journalist Mona El-Naggar delivered a haunting lecture at the American Academy on her film about two Palestinians fleeing the destruction of Gaza. At the end of her talk, there was, again, almost complete silence. The director Volker ...”

“... cancers of the bowel, breast and lung and dental caries. It is already a formidable list, and may have to be extended as further evidence becomes available. While there may be differences of opinion about the acceptability of some of these conditions as Western diseases, the general conclusion that many of them are now ...”

“... Public Industries, where Redwood and Hatch, while accepting that the concept of the PSBR may function as a crude check on official profligacy in an imperfect world, go so far as to admit that in an ideal world ‘the PSBR, as currently defined, is a theoretical nonsense.’) In any event, the future magnitude of an entity that can be neither ...”

“... at least fifteen years before the Palestinians became a political factor in that country. In May 1955 Sharret confided his feelings in these words: ‘I have been meditating on the long chain of false incidents and hostilities we have invented, on the many clashes we have provoked which cost us so much blood, and on the violations of the law by our men ...”

“... being taken to try to deal with the subtle and sometimes subconscious forms of discrimination that may have undesirable effects on girls’ aspirations. Thirdly, there have been many changes to the curriculum to meet newly recognised needs. These include the introduction of important subjects such as health education, provision for minority-group languages ...”

“... work. For example, in order to plough a large area a tractor-driver ploughs shallowly. Milkmaids may reach their amazing targets in terms of volume but may produce dirty milk which has gone sour. This is also true at the level of the farm, where quantity is more important than quality. Most damaging of all, this ...”

“... light on the mystery of human existence. Bede wrote this a hundred years after the event and it may reflect his wishful thinking. Even if it does, the story conveys an ideal of how conversion should happen. From the whole array of accounts it is clear that the missionaries were first and foremost preachers – the Lives say this expressly of at least a ...”

“... 65 years after it was created, the humour seems trite and self-consciously cute, although this may be due to the current preference for technique over subtlety. Les Masques(1933) was the first ballet to incorporate what became known as the ‘Fred Step’ (a combination of five steps which he credited to Pavlova). It became a talisman, or a trademark, and ...”

“... is overlooked: he was an indifferent student, enjoys the occasional lie-in with his wife and may have dyed his beard. If Sharrock and Devenport are right, what justification can there be for dealing with Gerry Adams? Morally, it’s repugnant; politically, it’s worthless. The peace process is premised on the belief that all sides – and above all, the ...”

“... of the three caskets. Like Portia, or indeed like Catherine Sloper in Washington Square, Ellen may neither choose whom she would, nor refuse whom she dislikes. In a double entrapment, she is caught between the suitor who conforms to her father’s wishes and the stranger who stirs her innermost longings. As Mr Cave’s ‘industrial advance’ seems to ...”

“... James Fox, who was contesting Westminster in the September General Election and whose mistress she may, or may not, at some point have been. Although she was there for only a short time, many were shocked by her boldness. At the Westminster by-election two years later, caused by Fox having become Foreign Secretary in the ...”

“... and shape another life – a night life, this time? And who knows when or how this new union may dissolve, as Destiny decides? At least as early as the middle of the ninth century, a cycle entitled The Book of the Tale of the Thousand Nights was apparently put together and written down in Arabic. In their nearly thousand-and-one-year journey to our ...”

“... since he does not end up sacrificing Isaac, we have no way of knowing whether he was going to: it may be that he was responding with a challenge of his own that made God back away from the absurdity of his demand. The rabbis and Church Fathers may have interpreted Abraham’s behaviour as the perfect obedience to the deity ...”

“... the main protagonists in the Angolan war – Angola, Cuba, South Africa and the United States – may just bring about a settlement. Yet peace remains a plausible outcome at best. South Africa has committed its forces to regular combat in Angola for thirteen years. In so doing, it has sought primarily to restrict the activities of exiled Namibian guerrillas ...”