“... It is a fundamental part of the male Western musical stage that the most large-scale, lavish, man-made performances should focus on one woman’s self-abandoned, isolated voicing of pain. Dido, Ariadne, Butterfly abandoned-fine. Theseus, Heracles, Attila abandoned? No: Heracles mad, Prometheus bound, Don Carlos betrayed. Other bad things happen to ...”

“... and unashamed, she once performed the original act or sin of flouting God’s will and of bringing man to full knowledge of himself. Since that time she has served as a constant reminder of the fallen state, and, to Baudelaire, was only tolerable when her body was corseted, her legs disguised by a crinoline, her arms immobilised by the dropped sleeves of her ...”

“... dispute over the uniqueness of Nazi crime. Fest was a handsome, restless, rather unhappy man. In postwar West Germany, he never fitted into any of the conventional slots. He had no time at all for Soviet socialism, which he considered an early variant of the virus that later produced the Nazis, or for any Western form of Marxism. But although a ...”

“... narrative: of self-instruction, of real or imagined progress, of an artistic career. Gayford’s Man with a Blue Scarf is a narrative of a single episode: his seven-month sitting for the picture of his title. Structured like a journal, with each entry amounting to a kind of brushstroke, it is one of the best books about art, and the making of art, that I ...”

“... lungs. Non-human illnesses: men dying from the blights of sheep, of birds, of cats, diseases no man had ever died of before. Men dying in the time it takes to catch and throw off a cold: ‘One Thursday,’ David France writes in How to Survive a Plague, ‘sexy Tommy McCarthy from the classifieds department stayed out late at an Yma Sumac concert. Friday ...”

“... Days of Hope, 1915: The Death of Innocence, Somme, They Called It Passchendaele, The Roses of No Man’s Land, To the Last Man: Spring 1918) are a fairly devastating moral education for the reader. And once you begin to delve, as I have done, into the netherworld of popular military history – battlefield guides, memorial ...”

“... was called in to suppress rioting. Among the survivors was Chester Himes, a twenty-year-old black man serving a twenty-year sentence for armed robbery. Himes had already seen his share of troubles but, as Lawrence Jackson writes in his impressive biography, they ‘did not inspire him’ the way that ‘stumbling through the gore of two cell block ...”

“... Darcy’s point of view; the events of Mansfield Park as seen by a maidservant; a play about Anne De Bourgh’s wedding – no minor character or plot line is left unturned. Austenians not only buy and read these books, they maintain a lively conversation, in person and online, about sequels, continuations, adaptations and completions. ‘The ...”

“... elsewhere, the favoured colonial minority was always the Islamic one. Perhaps this was because, as Paul Scott has one of his characters say in The Raj Quartet, the British ‘prefer Muslims to Hindus (because of the closer affinity that exists between God and Allah than exists between God and the Brahma)’. The character is Harry Coomer or Hari Kumar, ground ...”

“... or between masters and slaves.’ For such statements he has recently been taken to task by G.E.M. de Ste Croix, in his massive study of The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World. Although I agree with Ste Croix that Finley’s treatment of the Marxist theory of classes is somewhat sloppy, I do not believe the substantive disagreements are large. Finley in ...”

“... he sat Lulu next to her while he himself lay recumbent at their feet. The taxi-driver, like the man Magritte had kicked some thirty years before, was so thrown by this ‘solution’ that he drove off without a word. Such behaviour, while diverting, is not so very surprising. What I did find mildly out of character was Magritte’s petty dishonesty – his ...”

“... half a leg but still pluming and gasping in the Spectator about his bad character. Never did a man receive drinks with such a sense of entitlement: he hated himself, of course, which was a burden on everybody, despite the cartoons and all that guff, the play starring Peter O’Toole. Bernard was a nasty, jealous misogynist who found a perfect safe house at ...”

“... blank votes: the second highest proportion in almost half a century. What did the victory of a man claiming to be of the centre who is also the author of a book entitled Revolution really mean? Once he was in office, Macron’s politics became clearer. He began by choosing figures from the centre-right Les Républicains, the successor of Chirac and ...”

“... been the routine instruments of Fascism, were resolved to prevent anything comparable to German de-Nazification. But they were in a minority in the cabinet, where the secular left held more posts. At this juncture the PCI, instead of putting the DC on the defensive by pressing for an uncompromising purge of the state – cleaning out all senior ...”

“... time, starting with the introduction, a five-page polemic against the spirit of our age: Jean-Paul Sartre – for or against? Raymond Aron – for or against? … Should we take a blowtorch to May 1968 and its ideas … seen now as incomprehensible, elitist, dangerous and anti-democratic? Have the protagonists of that revolution … all become little ...”