“... by the diva Mara Zampieri, and staged, in keeping with Beardsley’s erotic drawings, by Jürgen Rose, it was a feast for eye and ear. And yet as I crossed the road to the Cafè Sacher afterwards I wondered how successful the performance had really been. Was it Barlog’s intention to provide Herod with a richly-textured personality and leave his daughter ...”

“... Austerlitz, New York. A servant found her in the morning, lying there with a broken neck.Millay rose to fame while still in her twenties. She beat Robert Frost and Wallace Stevens for the Pulitzer Prize in 1923. Although she became a proselytiser in her last decade, devoted to progressive causes to which she fitted her verses (‘not poems, posters,’ she ...”

“... corals. He said. But unresisting, took a rhyme, Watched the floating bulk of language approach, Rose up, and at the crucial tilt of time Shot out that sharp harpoon and saw it broach The stanza’s shoulders to a ship-bell’s chime. And Melville needn’t try to drive a coach And horses through my case in his next book. He uses metre in his prose, the ...”

“... spirit appeared in his room in East Harlem and declaimed ‘The Sunflower’ and ‘The Sick Rose’ in an unearthly voice. A lot of people thought he’d gone mad. As late as 1952 he was hoping a new analyst would ‘cure’ him of his homosexuality and help him integrate into society. But in 1954 he moved to San Francisco where he found a new type of ...”

“... Christ and Gabriel stranded on the rim of a monumental blank which would have been the Celestial Rose. They are diminutive figures in a daunting emptiness created by large-scale erasures: proof that the Empyrean is beyond depiction or description. As for the preceding Canto, there is nothing at all. Botticelli took the parchment set aside for this ...”

“... To put it bluntly, have things been getting better or worse? It is not the least virtue of Mark Nathan Cohen’s revaluation of the ‘diseases of civilisation’ question that he does not push a simple solution. He offers a qualified pessimism about the past, and a question-mark for the future. Cultural anthropology ...”

“... in 939 by planting sharp wooden stakes at low tide in the bed of the Red River. When the tide rose the stakes became invisible to the unsuspecting Chinese and impaled their armada. Heroism and guerrilla resistance became second nature to the Vietnamese and shaped their later opposition to French colonialism. Examples of patriotic resistance were used ...”

“... Patience is a mark of the classic, according to Frank Kermode. ‘King Lear, underlying a thousand dispositions, subsists in change, prevails, by being patient of interpretation.’ It follows that a work of art is not a classic if it insists, apparently, on being read in one way. By that criterion, Ulysses would appear to be a classic ...”

“... New Order took shape. His old National Union was the only party permitted and its membership rose to a respectable figure for the first time. The Nuremberg race laws were introduced into Norway, and the clause in the original 1814 Constitution prohibiting Jews from entering the country was reintroduced after nearly a century. Taxes were levied to cover ...”

“... took her pleasure with the young actors and actresses of her revolutionary operas, or sprinkled a rose with water to photograph for her entranced American biographer, Professor Roxane Witke. Disgust with this sort of behaviour should not be mistaken for antifeminism (even if this also exists in some measure), as commentators like Dr Mirsky have tended to ...”

“... sown with salt, and all the sowers gone, and the seeds lain however long in the earth, till there rose finally in vegetable profusion leaves and trees of rime and brine. What flowering would there be in such a garden? Light would force each salt calyx to open in prisms, and to fruit heavily with bright globes of water – peaches and grapes are little more ...”

“... EastEnders has provided a study of sexual and domestic violence. Too much for some: one critic, Mark Lawson, complained that the prevalence of rape was making the programme ‘impossible to write or to act’, and that the series, by exploiting the topic in the service of ratings, was therefore a form of violence in itself.For others, the stories of Kathy ...”

“... Almost from the moment Kennedy announced his candidacy for the presidency, he was lobbied by Alex Rose, a Democratic Party powerhouse and president of the United Hatters, Cap and Millinery Workers’ International Union, to put on a hat, any hat: fedora, top hat, derby or homburg. Bowing perhaps to the pressure from the hatters or anxious to begin ...”

“... gallery’s founders, and in the half-light among the sarcophagi is a Twombly sculpture: a black rose resting on a marble pebble resting on a box covered in faded velvet. The label on the box reads: THAT WHICH I SHOULD HAVE DONE, I DID NOT DO. Nicholas Cullinan, whose great idea this exhibition was, makes the connection to Poussin’s contrary (though ...”

“... birds that flit and scurry and sing and build in our gardens. They are like iridescent spray: the rose-flush on the breast of a male chaffinch, the gold ring round the eye of a blackbird, the jet-black cap above the slatey body of a great tit. Sparrows are said to have become much less common, but 31 of them have frequented my garden in the past seven ...”