“... is dominated by the stupendous last-minute addition to Nijs’s acquisitions – the nine nine-foot-wide canvases that make up Mantegna’s Triumphs of Caesar and which are normally housed at Hampton Court Palace. Leaving Mantua, the curators argue, saved them from the Landsknechts who ransacked the Gonzaga palace in an episode of the Thirty ...”

“... but the most interestingly historical of them, Y Gododdín, does so only tangentially. Whatever John Morris and Leslie Alcock may have written in the 1970s and 1980s, the evidence provides ‘no space … for an “Age of Arthur” during which a victorious British emperor-like figure held back the barbarian hordes’. That image really dates back to the ...”

“... on a moral ladder. Being ‘heathen’ and not Christian kept most strangers near the ladder’s foot. But the English added another rung: mockery. Wearing grass skirts, worshipping monkeys, eating missionaries, chanting woo-woo ‘animal noises’ or merely being Black? Hilarious! The returning traveller could always raise hearty laughs. Lewis, too, can ...”

“... Strong’s own account and the version given by his predecessor, the terrifying and not-much-loved John Pope-Hennessy, in his autobiography, Learning to Look. Both directors describe in some detail the office arrangement at the start of Strong’s appointment in 1974. Strong himself bemoans the primitiveness of it all: not just ‘no direct telephone to the ...”

“... where he could hardly bear to hear Italian spoken. Similarly, an already dicey relationship with John Foster Dulles seems to have been ruined beyond repair by Dulles’s hand-on-arm habits and his halitosis. There were otherwise unexplained enmities towards Eden throughout his career which were surely based on the belief that he was gay, but since ...”

“... and went, rightly, for astronomical fixes wherever possible. But even here error crept in. As John Noble Wilford reminds us, ‘even as late as 1740, it was estimated that not more than 116 places on earth had been correctly located by astronomical observation.’ When we also recall that Ptolemy had no method of accurate time-keeping, we can only marvel ...”

“... What is wrong with the idea of a world state? John Rawls, the world’s most celebrated living political philosopher, believes that the answer is relatively straightforward. ‘I follow Kant’s lead in Perpetual Peace,’ he writes, ‘in thinking that a world government – by which I mean a unified political regime with the legal powers normally exercised by central government – would either be a global despotism or else would rule over a fragile empire torn by frequent civil strife as various regions and peoples tried to gain their political freedom and autonomy ...”

“... In the first vehicle, Blackett saw a flash and sparks at 23.37 hrs, and told the driver to put his foot down and get out of there. Then he realised the second snatch wasn’t following them and went back to help. They radioed headquarters as their snatch rumbled back to the stricken vehicle. The regimental medical officer at Camp Abu Naji, Captain Vickers, was ...”

“... memorialist of Ireland’s ancient past, from Crofton Croker to George Petrie, Sir William Wilde, John O’Donovan, Eugene Curry and a host of others has issued this same warning. What you see now will soon be visible no more; what you see now is only the remnant of what once was. There is, of course, a great deal of truth in this. All traditional cultures ...”

“... once the Santa Clara Valley. We now seem to sit not at the head of the Salinas Valley but at the foot of the Valley of Silicon.’ Agricultural land worth $18,000 an acre is steadily being converted into building land worth anywhere from $55,000 to $110,000 an acre. And gleaming in the eye of every booster in town is the utopia promised by the powerful ...”

“... is itself tangled: clearly he is describing a 17th-century version of shooting oneself in the foot, but equally clearly the Tartars are not to be imagined as shooting themselves, but as shooting their enemies while appearing to flee, whereas in the case of language it is those who use it who are hit. Hill’s argument is that, since ‘even the most ...”

“... he spent eight months in a French military prison in Algiers, returned to France, then escaped on foot across the Pyrenees, joined the Free French forces in England and landed in Normandy just as his elegant first wife was being ‘dragged from her plank bed by the hair of her head and thrown into the oven alive’ at Ravensbrück concentration camp. She was ...”

“... Rutherford Robertson reminds us in his eloquent foreword, Parkinson was the first artist to set foot on Australian soil – a series of appraisals of different aspects of Parkinson’s work by 11 leading scholars has been brought between two covers, accompanied by a magnificent selection of his drawings and by authoritative notes recounting the often ...”

“... select, breasts – elbows,      what else is allowed by the vebal smash-up piled under foot. Crush tread trample distinguish put your choice in the hands of the town clerk, the army stuffing its drum. Rubbish is    pertinent; essential; the    most intricate presence in    our entire culture; the ultimate sexual point of the whole ...”

“... gainful employment elsewhere, but preferred to match themselves against the succession of 700-foot dunes. He well knew that blood feuds raged among the tribes, and says that if anyone had killed one of his companions he would unquestionably have sought to avenge him: ‘I have no belief in the “sanctity” of life.’ Soon the oil men came to desecrate ...”