“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... theme, to the same awful convent school that Antonia White attended and wrote about in Frost in May. Vicious nuns, a minimal education for middle-class marriage and – something, at least – a powerful enemy to kick against. As an adult she would spit on the street if she saw nuns. Earlier, she had a more sophisticated mode of expression. ‘I’m so ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... The list could go on, and on. And it does. The chapters dated 500 AD (After Dave) may have been great fun to write, but the future is always hard to read. The jokes pall; the exposition becomes first oppressive, then boring; and, structurally, by dividing the novel in two and having both parts running alternately (a chapter about the Hamsters ...”

“... is something like: ‘I will fight and, if need be, lay down my life for a Bill of Rights that may have this implication.’ A more troubling reading, however, is that Nazi speech is worth protecting even if a consequence of that protection is that someone gets hurt or killed. ‘I will defend your right to say it, even if your saying it makes violence ...”

“... is not jarring polemical judgments but the breathtaking architecture of the whole. His style may be a marvel of burnished rhetoric, shimmering with insight and intelligence, but it also lacks a political cutting edge. There may even be a sense in which this totality is Jameson’s personal utopian alternative to the ...”

“... I need to bear witness to an uncertain event. I feel it roaring inside me – this thing that may not have taken place. I don’t even know what name to put on it. I think you might call it a crime of the flesh, but the flesh is long fallen away and I am not sure what hurt may linger in the bones. Liam was the victim ...”

“... a ‘rented room in Whalley Range’, about iron bridges and ‘a river the colour of lead’. In May 1983, Paul Slattery – who had photographed Joy Division in 1979, too, beside an industrial estate in Stockport – took some shots for Sounds of The Smiths standing in the ruins of Central Station, once the pride of the Midland Railway Company but by then a ...”

“... to ‘officialise’ Igbo domination of the Northern Region.Anti-Igbo riots began in Kano in May 1966, while Ironsi was still at the helm, and quickly spread to other northern cities. In all, several hundred Igbo were killed, some of whom hardly helped their cause by publicly displaying a famous picture from Drum magazine of a prostrate Bello, the ...”

“... were so evident in history writing. The transactions Vaughan witnessed in the Antwerp Bourse may have reflected fluctuations in trade or the availability of bullion, but they were also affected by the gossip that was an integral part of any broker’s life, and by the reputation of a particular financial house or individual. One merchant renowned for his ...”

“... list, who claims that he in fact owns the boat. The Italian media have suggested that Khudainatov may technically also be the owner of the 140-metre, $700 million Scheherazade, impounded in May 2022 by port authorities in Tuscany. Scheherazade is also sometimes referred to as ‘Putin’s boat’, or (according to the ...”

“... Wilkin’s selection of 27 articles offer a reasonable overview of Dupin’s analysis. Readers may, however, be perplexed by their argument that Dupin’s ‘Enlightenment feminism’ was limited by remainingembedded in contemporary white feminism, in which middle-class and wealthy white women aspire to the goods and prestige the most fortunate white men ...”

“... that welfare paternalism would stamp out private initiative?The real ‘sheep’s clothing’ may be the Persian lamb coat that belongs to an ageing actress with hair styled like Thatcher’s – one of the grander spoils that Dale’s two scammers, Grace and Janice, pilfer from their ‘old dears’. Grace and Janice are false prophets who peddle the ...”