“... in the Wood crave the rainy, stained and soggy. Yet the later Murdoch was a hard-line Tory, who may well have been liberal in her aesthetics but was hardly so in her politics. She had right-wing views on most topics, and lambasted the work of Derrida while having only the flimsiest notion of what it was about. Not much warm-hearted jumble there. On the ...”

“... pessimism. True architecture, he pursues, buildings aglow with painting, sculpture and craft, may be impossible in an age bereft of faith and tranquillity. In which case the best that can be done is to give up on style and ‘architecture’ altogether and go for good, honest building. The ending of The Seven Lamps of Architecture vibrates through the ...”

“... back yard. But unlike This Book Will Save Your Life, Music for Torching is stuffed with life. They may be experiencing a common phenomenon – the mid-life crisis – but the Weisses respond with drastic action, like a cat fighting its way out of a paper bag. Paul gets a tattoo, vomits a ‘pink, chunky mess’ of baby shrimp onto the street, shaves off all ...”

“... courage and political success – but it is usually difficult to pin them down, and there may also be unfounded fears that medicine murderers are abroad. Two generalisations are nevertheless well established. First, accusations of witchcraft target the poor, the odd and the weak, while it is the rich and powerful who are suspected of medicine ...”

“... only in textbooks. Among the most distinctive voices is that of Marcabru, a lower-class poet who may have invented the pastorela genre. His shepherdess sees right through the suasions of her courtly wooer: ‘Sir, a man whose brain’s gone balmy Swears great oaths, but he’s still crazy; Why make vows and try to praise me? Master,’ said this peasant ...”

“... furious kind and is instantly sacked (‘Pfired! So I’m pfucked!’). He tells his girlfriend he may be interested in someone else and dumps her: ‘I feel it would be unphilosophical to do anything but submit to my freedom.’ He flies to Ecuador. He takes a supply of Abulinix – still in phase-one clinical trials – that has been pilfered by his medical ...”

“... streets), her hours are irregular, but when she appears she works with heroic tenacity. She may show up at midnight and scrub floors until dawn. She lifts the heaviest furniture without complaint. But through all this she keeps her distance, and won’t even accept a cup of tea. Impervious to praise, indifferent to her employers, she appears to work ...”

“... will find yourself back with Odysseus (‘the nautical contrivances and tactics of the ancients may be observed in daily use … the Greek seas are still as fickle as ever’); in a country cottage you will find yourself entertained by someone who could pass for Homer’s swineherd Eumaeus. ‘Even the ferocious attacks of vermin, which soon find out an ...”

“... I have known him for many years and admire both his expertise and his commitment.) Barnett may not have seen Lhasa in the 1940s or 1950s, the last decades in which the Dalai Lama’s state could be said still to exist, though already under Chinese occupation, but for that period – and earlier – his scholarship compensates for his lack of direct ...”

“... into 3 lots of 12, 4 of 9, 6 of 6 or whatever, in a tidy, manageable way. One suspects it may have been schemed up and storyboarded before it was written. Which, for better or for worse, suggests a writer who wants to win mastery of his working methods. The story has two parallel plotlines, set up to counterpoint one another in predictable and ...”

“... interest rate on the bills increased from 20 per cent in the autumn of 1997 to over 40 per cent in May 1998. Wage arrears mounted in both the state and private sectors. In May 1998, social unrest erupted on a scale not seen for a decade. In 1989, the miners had gone on strike in favour of Yeltsin and the free market, which ...”

“... have also fed strikingly back into the culture out of which they came. The palace’s aesthetic may well have derived directly from the artistic world of the earlier 20th century (Evans compared a fragment of Minoan painting to a piece of Morris wallpaper). But later in the century, artists, film-makers and novelists (notably Mary Renault) in their turn ...”

“... and the names of banned writers listed (739 Jewish writers who wrote in French were included by May 1943). Some publishing houses were requisitioned (including Hachette), others were closed, while some newspaper editors were dismissed (Jean Prouvost of Paris-Soir was one). Other periodicals met with German approval and were given preferential treatment or ...”

“... story.’ Postcolonialism has left its mark: Pericles’ rival Cleon, they pointed out, ‘may have been right to say that democracy could not rule an empire’. Most strikingly, the gold-embossed representation of Pericles disappeared from the cover, and this is unlikely to have been done solely as an economic measure. The new Cambridge Companion to ...”

“... possibility’ that his father wasn’t the humdrum Jonathan, and that his grudging paternal uncle may have known it. Much else in the early life turns out to be ‘just possible’, ‘not impossible’ or ‘far-fetched … but worth considering’, not least when Swift leaves Trinity College Dublin and moves to England in the 1680s as private secretary ...”