“... years to spare, you can follow the internet discussions on what ‘quasi-subliminal’ images may or may not have been embedded by the film-makers, but when I was young I would always reliably see what was almost not there; when I was a student, earning a little money by being an experimental subject for trainee ...”

“... on the literary scene. Marvell’s habits of poetic imitation and allusiveness, stressed by Smith, may leave a lay audience wanting a wider understanding of his engagement with Ovid and other masters, and broader light on the relations of his writings to those of such contemporaries as Cowley and Cleveland and Denham. Smith’s is only the second ambitious ...”

“... in the 1760s, a summer season at the Haymarket theatre earned his company up to £5000, which may be multiplied a hundredfold for its value today. He had a townhouse on Suffolk Street, round the corner from the Haymarket, and a large leafy residence out in Fulham, and a fancy coach to convey him between the two. Always the dandy, he might be seen in a ...”

“... wealth inherently destructive. Timon of Athens only just made it into the First Folio, and it may never have been performed. But if the austerity of the text denied it popular appeal, it became down the centuries a catalyst of radical thought. Timon’s great speech about gold (‘This yellow slave/Will knit and break religions, bless ...”

“... a woman who kept her inner life sealed off from scrutiny. Indeed her preoccupation with surfaces may have been her deepest trait. Joe and Rose Kennedy led separate lives: he pursued money, sex and political ambition; she strained after moral and social perfection. They were united in their obsession with keeping up appearances, their pleasure in consorting ...”

“... of breadth. When historians or geographers exhibit false accounts of places far distant, they may be forgiven, because they can tell but what they are told … but Boethius lived at no great distance; if he never saw the lake, he must have been very incurious, and if he had seen it, his veracity yielded to very slight temptations. Apparently unable to ...”

“... turns out that as seen from the private quarters the West Wing barely registers. Of course, that may have been the point of these conversations, which Clinton set up with his old friend Branch (they had been roommates together while working on George McGovern’s disastrous presidential campaign of 1972) in order to record for posterity a real-time overview ...”

“... Pro Milone in defence of a man rightly accused of murdering the ex-mistress’s brother. It may seem a bit odd that a criminal barrister should rise so high in the political firmament, but when we talk about late Roman Republican murder trials we are not talking about gang wars and domestic violence. Given the narrowness of the political elite and the ...”

“... of the lyric etc. The novel is in that sense always ‘lawless’, as Gide liked to say, and we may have to raise some questions when someone like Henry James comes along and offers to codify its new ‘laws’ in doctrines like ‘point of view’. Even though he is virtually absent from this book, for reasons I will come to, Faulkner offered his own ...”

“... month I was granted British citizenship and I very much love this country. Possibly I may die, but I will die as a free person, and my son and wife are free people. And Britain is a great country.’ Litvinenko died four days later, on 23 November 2006. Six hours before it happened Scotland Yard got a phone call from the Atomic Weapons ...”

“... George and Clemenceau to rescind their wartime promises to Japan. News of China’s failure in May 1919 brought enraged students out on the streets of Beijing, denouncing the US president as a liar. Demonstrations and strikes erupted across China in what would later be known as the May Fourth Movement, an explosion of ...”

“... that it is a ‘last word’ not only because that is what a woman always has, but because it may be in a sense the last word this woman will ever speak: Teach me, only teach, Love!     As I ought I will speak thy speech, Love,     Think thy thought – In ‘Porphyria’s Lover’, Browning engineered a reversal from what looked like ...”

“... physical assaults. By the spring of 1950 the question was when, not whether to leave, and on 9 May NEAT signed a contract with the Iraqi government to organise their departure. For Richard Armstrong and NEAT, the uprooting of the Middle East’s most ancient Jewish community was not a mere business transaction: it was a mission. Armstrong was really Shlomo ...”

“... The British Army occupied Jerusalem on Sunday, 9 December 1917, and withdrew on 14 May 1948. During its brief imperium in the Promised Land, Britain kept the promise made in 1917 by its Foreign Secretary, Arthur James Balfour, in the Declaration that bears his name, ‘to favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people ...”

“... discordantly, so that they seem out of place in reality, fictions declaring their artifice. It may be said – he has said as much himself – that Godard just isn’t very good at telling stories, and borrows them from here and there without really believing in them. But out of that deficiency he has made an aesthetic, a Modernist aesthetic in which the ...”