“... with firm, frontally presented bodies or with devices that enhance its given texture. Thus stone may, in his metaphors, ‘disclose itself’ or ‘grow steadfastly’, emerging into ‘stone-blossom’. The ideal carver merely helps the stone to unfurl. Taken as prompts to interest English readers in distant Italian reliefs, these marine and vegetable ...”

“... of escape’ – escape from society. Finally (and to be taken foremost) is A Sort of Clowning by Richard Hoggart, perhaps the most usefully class-conscious English writer of our time. He created an accepted general idea of the British ‘working class’ in 1957, with The Uses of Literacy. He developed his concept, most recently, in his memoir, A Local ...”

“... Courtney; a prolific writer, she also produced a six-volume dictionary of female biography, and may have been the author of an Appeal to the Men of Great Britain in Behalf of Women. Understandably, the compilers of the DNB in its early years had a particular predilection for biographers, but they did not read the signs of the times so well as to believe ...”

“... The Origin of Species a day. By the time you read this, the project will be nearly done, though it may take another year to align the bits of sequence and fill in the gaps. As the most visible (and expensive) product of Big Biology, the human genome project has understandably attracted much public attention. The excitement stems not from decoding the genome of ...”

“... whose minds are open to such immoral influences, and into whose hands a publication of this sort may fall.’ The tract before the court, he went on, ‘would suggest to the minds of the young of either sex, or even to persons of more advanced years, thoughts of a most impure and libidinous character’. Here, couched in Victorian prose, was the erection ...”

“... as looking like Hamlet’s aunt, and this must have made sense to most of his readers). We may therefore conclude that this is our culture’s leading night out: even in an electronic age, one of the best shows going. But it’s worth recalling that the word ‘show’ took on precisely this usage only late in the 19th century. When Shakespeare says of ...”

“... it could inflict intolerable damage, not so much with its dozen or so nuclear warheads, which it may not be able to aim accurately at its enemies, but by conventional methods. Commandos infiltrated by submarine would cause terror and havoc in coastal cities in South Korea. Thousands of artillery pieces secreted in tunnels just over the border would bombard ...”

“... that any substantially increased possibility of their use or any sudden change in their deployment may well be regarded as a definite threat to peace.’ The principle was invoked by George W. Bush in 2003 and by Donald Trump this year; it’s possible to deplore the methods and motivation for the invasion of Iraq and the attack on Iran while agreeing that ...”

“... to them that a boy who tries to obey Scout Laws, whatever else he does, will not grow up like Richard Nixon. (In Britain, of course, where Scoutcraft entails wiliness, such a boy might well grow up like Harold Wilson.) On Fussell’s cover is a picture of a keen-eyed lad with ‘Boy Scouts of America’ stitched on his khaki shirt: he is wearing the ...”

“... was as mystifying as a book written by a judge and called Overcoming Law. The judge in this case, Richard Posner, is the Chief Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. He is also a senior lecturer in law at Chicago University and a widely published polemicist. At the heart of his polemics are three pulses, legal pragmatism, Millian ...”

“... making ambitious claims for the importance of the work and explaining his choice of title. Next, Richard Shone, an associate editor of the Burlington Magazine, perhaps best known for his scholarly work on the Bloomsbury Group, gives a detailed chronicle of the careers of the artists, whom he describes as loosely ‘entwined’ in a single history. He sees ...”

“... not central to an understanding of his work. There are portraits, including a fine El Greco that may or may not be of the architect; there is Bassano’s Tower of Babel, showing masons, bricklayers, plasterers and carpenters at work; there are views made by Canaletto a couple of hundred years later that show Palladio’s ...”

“... going anywhere near that one,’ Mr Eadie replied. By any standard, a divorce is not a change that may occur ‘from time to time’: it is at the very least a repeal, and when it comes to common law, a repeal, involving a withdrawal of rights, would normally require an Act of Parliament. Under the Bill of Rights, a royal prerogative to dispense with laws ...”

“... and still capture a good deal besides. And it’s the besides that is often the point: there may be a central or off-central subject in a Klein photograph, but at least half the drama unfolds at the edges, where nobody is quite sure if they are in the frame or why. Another example, taken on Mayday in Moscow in 1961, is better known because it appears in ...”

“... six feet, impulsive and urban’. Not so stimulating, if we’re to take Updike’s word, were Richard Maple and many of his cousins. With Mary and the four Updike children as his most generous sources, Begley is able to trace the degree of autobiography present in Updike’s fiction. It’s in many places very high. When Mary and John separated after two ...”