“... secular verse. Guest concentrates exclusively on Smart as a religious poet, in fact, and it may be a sign of our current lack of confidence in literary ‘greatness’ that ‘the ambition and significance’ of his achievement are eventually defined in a context of mid-18th-century religious preoccupations. Making clear the contemporary issues at stake ...”

“... though by no means uncritical, view of his poets – quite properly, since some persuasion may be needed to encourage readers to tackle writers with names such as Walahfrid the Squinter and Notker the Stutterer, not to speak of the outlandish ‘Nepos Cracavist’. At its worst, and not infrequently, the poetry in his book suffers from a pervasive ...”

“... In the process, we see that these two types of material are not so different as they may at first seem. The most striking similarity between the superhero comic and the memoir-in-comics is the motif of ‘double identity’. This is perhaps the defining feature of the superhero. We recognise Superman not by his ability to freeze objects by ...”

“... right-wing electoral politics, through the generation of co-operative economic development, and may prove to be a far more powerful agent for North American interests than the CIA can ever be. As developmental economists realised in the Sixties, and as the American banks were to learn in the Eighties, underdevelopment, once the underpinning of the European ...”

“... David Sylvester, who contributed regularly to this paper, died last June. People who worked with him usually agree that he was the most engaged and patient looker at art they ever knew. Robert Rosenblum rightly says, in David Sylvester: The Private Collection, that there was something comical about his high seriousness, but it is also true that, ‘unlike the rest of us ironists’, he could make one feel (or at least feel one ought to feel) that ‘art might matter more than life itself ...”

“... he grows older, he becomes more attached to the values of Athens as against those of Sparta: It may seem paradoxical to add that for that very reason my admiration for the spirit and institutions of this country grew incomparably stronger in the years 1939 to 1940, when I suppose the British showed the greatest fidelity in their history to the Spartan ...”

“... which also exists in a pastelised version (a drawing Degas made for that monotype in about 1880 may also have served as a point of departure for the figure of the boulangère): the bather monotypes of the late 1870s are themselves closely related to the brothel monotypes of the same period. There is evidence here of a systematic exploration, in various ...”

“... where they showed their gratitude by electing a man in a monkey-suit as mayor, an event which may finally have sent Peter Mandelson round the bend.) But Blair has not yet been able to embrace the referendum that Goldsmith among others forced him to sign up for, the one on Britain’s entry into the euro. The reason, of course, is not the will of the ...”

“... to study in moulding their own attitudes and policies in the age of advancing globalisation. They may be unfashionable questions in today’s cultural climate, but they require cogent, responsible answers. In recent years, the most aggressive efforts to arouse nativist sentiments have backfired badly. When California’s Governor Pete Wilson spoke out in ...”

“... theory, stipulates a trade-off between how precisely a quantum object’s position and momentum may be specified. In other words, nothing – not even gluons – can force quarks to sit perfectly still in a fixed location. The more gluons act to keep the new quarks fixed squarely on top of the original one, the more energetically those quarks jump ...”

“... to sanction them. The extraction of equity often means profits now, costs later – and the costs may be borne by someone else, since they accrue to the firm, not to those who appropriate the profits. In developed capitalist countries, this formula has been generating outsize fortunes at the price of outsize misery for the past forty years at ...”

“... moment in the 18th century when Anglo-French relations reached their lowest point was probably 29 May 1794 – 10 Prairial, Year II, as the French then styled it. On that day, the Jacobin Bertrand Barère delivered a typically long-winded and overheated speech to France’s National Convention on his favourite subject, English perfidy. He accused English ...”

“... signal the intimation of half-thoughts, shadowy promptings of a kind that only a first-rate writer may catch in words. There is a scene early in The Shopworn Angel where he sits in a taxi beside Margaret Sullavan, a soldier accepting a lift from a posh woman, speaking softly partly because he is shy of her beauty but also because he feels in the wrong: she is ...”

“... streets named after Churchill (more than 150 in Australia, only one in Cornwall). And many readers may find three chapters on Australia and New Zealand more than they need, especially when the complex reactions to him in France and Germany are covered in one broad-brush chapter on ‘Churchill and the Europeans’. The book is invaluable nonetheless, as the ...”

“... his second, more narrowly focused, but equally instructive new book, The Saint-Napoléon. Readers may initially wonder if they have missed a Napoleon among the pantheon of Catholic saints, but no one had heard of him until 1805, when Napoleon asked the pope to canonise a new saint for his birthday. With Rome under the control of the French army, the pope ...”