“... rider on a black horse’. He turned out to be dull as dishwater. Emma’s imagination was held hostage by the 19th-century bourgeois ideal of revelatory, eternal love within marriage. She was enmeshed in a particular set of historical circumstances – a flourishing letter-writing culture, burgeoning female literacy, an emerging awareness of urban ...”

“... to be reminded. The Altarpiece in the Renaissance consists of papers delivered at a conference held at the Warburg Institute and Birkbeck College in 1987. It includes studies of sculpture as well as painting and of altarpieces in the Netherlands, Germany and Spain as well as Italy. The most stimulating paper is one by Bernhard Decker which speculates on ...”

“... General Meetings. Normally, Tory MPs are allowed to ‘get on with the job’ rather than being held accountable as Labour MPs are supposed to be. (In practice, Constituency Labour Parties tend to take a generous view of their MPs’ deviations, if they are thought to be serious, on policy matters.) On this occasion, a significant number of Tory MPs were ...”

“... is tacitly an admission that the two, the same and not the same, will always be magnetically held apart and held together by being like-poles. Kipling’s McAndrew discerned a Calvinistic predestination in ‘the stride o’ yon connectin’ rod’, and Ricks appears to identify some type of Medieval Catholic solder ...”

“... makes up little riddles. One of them is about dying – but nobody wants to hear about that: it is held to be a tasteless riddle. This is a comedy to make the reader doleful. Don Bloch, an American, writes about hospitals and medicine without any attempt to be funny. The Modern Common Wind is about leprosy in Kenya and could fairly be advertised as ‘not for ...”

“... some post-Mubarak continuation of it – may survive this challenge, but the illusions that have held it in place have crumbled. The protests in Tahrir Square are a message not only to Mubarak and the military regime that has ruled Egypt since the Free Officers coup of 1952; they are a message to all the region’s autocrats, particularly those supported by ...”

“... overgrown caravans. ‘It’s hard to keep the staff,’ Readhead confesses. The sticks which once held up the tepee are lying in a bundle on the ground. The school has been hounded by government inspectors. Readhead has compared their visits to ‘having a distant, nosy and somewhat prudish relative poking around your house, looking in the oven, smelling the ...”

“... done well to begin by heading for Button’s coffeehouse in Russell Street where the great man held court, and be as submissively impressive as possible. Almost three hundred years later, though sadly not for very long, you could make your way to the Pillars of Hercules in Greek Street, where Ian Hamilton, editor of the New Review, was usually to be ...”

“... to allow. In both cases, thousands of people suspected of assisting the enemy were arrested and held without charge, and military tribunals were established to circumvent civilian courts. Both Lincoln and Bush met frequently with evangelical ministers, trying to ensure their active support for government policies. Leading members of both Administrations ...”

“... at the best of times – failed to perceive their good fortune; they still don’t.Although David Trimble, the leader of the Ulster Unionist Party, had played a central role in negotiating the agreement, many unionists believed they had been conned. While the agreement won the near unanimous endorsement of nationalists in Northern Ireland, it was ...”

“... who bequeathed the presidency to his son, Ilham, when he died in 2003. The celebrations were held at Gulustan Palace, a Soviet-era complex overlooking Baku Bay. BP’s chairman, Helge Lund, and its former CEO Lord Browne had come, as a corporate press release put it, to ‘pay tribute’ to Heydar’s ‘exceptional contributions to the development of ...”

“... and the years that followed; specific gravestones seemed to have been targeted.A volunteer called David Ramírez López found a pistol bullet in the grave. He held it up for the others to see. The lead had been flattened by impact into a squat, pluglike shape and the decomposition of organic matter around it had made it ...”

“... gambled his adolescent life on the odds that one of the five empty chambers of the revolver he held to his head would come up when he pulled the trigger (or so he later wanted us to believe). In his case, it is not clear which outcome should more properly be regarded as failure: ‘winning’ at Russian roulette could be seen as condemning him to more ...”

“... synonyms every week. It was with characteristic British reserve, though, that Lieutenant-Colonel David Morgan, Commandant of the 1st Battalion of the Seventh Duke of Edinburgh’s Own Gurkha Riders, set about straightening things out. The Gurkhas are the British soldiers whom, in an ugly slur, Garcia Marquez accused of committing almost unprintable ...”

“... the court I heard shouts from the narrow window above the door of the room where Ahmad was being held. ‘I warn you,’ he called to his father, ‘don’t pay the fine. You hear me. I don’t want you to pay any fine to these Zionist occupiers.’ I asked his mother what had happened. She sounded as though she was reading from a prepared text. ‘Ahmad was ...”