“... the long run,’ observes Pocock’s concluding essay, ‘Charles I was executed for not being a king, Louis XVI for being one.’ Pocock’s prose, alas, is not always so pithy. Since his first book, his writing has become ever more circuitous and ever less disciplined. Yet this defect, maddening as it can be, has an honourable source. An appendix to the ...”

“... of 15 January for the deadline, because it is the officially celebrated birthday of Martin Luther King and many felt that Bush either knew this and did not care or, worse still, had not noticed. But, except for a fistful of Trotskyists, all those attending the rally in Lafayette Park last weekend were complaining of the financial cost of the war and implying ...”

“... and beautiful, quite unlike any previous art. Other St Martin’s sculptors included Phillip King, Tim Scott and William Tucker, all innovative artists who became tutors at St Martin’s immediately after completing their own studies. Thenceforward there was a line of sculptors at St Martins who changed, even further, the concept of what sculpture might ...”

“... sufficiently sane. I was like a mad carpenter making a box. Were he ever so convinced that he was King of Jerusalem, the box he would make would be a sane box. I need not go on, for readers of Nostromo and The Shadow-Line will know the extraordinary profusion of significances that Conrad extracts from this symbolism of dead water and a shadowy ...”

“... he was satisfied’, all the details coalesce into a portrait of Eugenides’s late contemporary David Foster Wallace. I want to call Leonard a ‘tribute’ to Wallace, whose suicide presumably occurred while Eugenides was in the middle of writing the book. But most of the time Leonard is an unpleasant character. Mitchell Grammaticus particularly dislikes ...”

“... resentment. Greek anti-semitism erupted in pogroms in Smyrna and Salonica. (Ottoman Jews, whom David Ben-Gurion despaired of converting to Zionism, were thus natural allies of the Turks.) In Alexandria under the Ottomans and from 1882 under the British, Europeans considered it acceptable to give Arabs a good hiding from time to time. The blending of ...”

“... Kerry, who was admirably forthright in calling for Mubarak to stand down, dismissed the idea: ‘King Abdullah of Jordan is extraordinarily intelligent, thoughtful, sensitive, in touch with his people. The monarchy there is very well respected, even revered.’ For years, Arab rulers told their Western patrons not to worry about their subjects, as though ...”

“... another example of ‘to fire out’ meaning what it is here taken to mean, and I notice that David and Ben Crystal, in their new glossary Shakespeare’s Words,* do not admit the venereal sense, giving only ‘to drive away by fire’. The poet is not even sure the parties have slept together, and could only have been certain of the consequence accepted ...”

“... rhyme in certain contexts. There is no single strategy at play. In French poetry of the period, as David Scott Wilson-Okamura has pointed out, feminine rhyme ‘gets used for everything and, in consequence, means nothing’. The same may be true of Scott-Baumann’s chosen authors. Feminine rhyme is used pointedly, stays sweet or is avoided. Can a collective ...”

“... how from these laconic texts, figures like Rebekah, Jacob, Joseph, Judah, Tamar, Moses, Saul, David and Ruth emerge, characters who, beyond any archetypal role they may play as bearers of a divine mandate, have been etched as indelibly vivid individuals in the imagination of a hundred generations’. This aim, he warns us, cannot be achieved without ...”

“... Civil War would not have taken place.’ Johnson manages to ignore the work of Edmund Morgan, David Brion Davis and numerous other scholars of the past thirty years who have demonstrated that slavery was an intrinsic element of American life almost from the beginning of the colonial era, and that it imparted a powerful exclusionary dimension to the ...”

“... other artists who had treated the subject (most notably Pietro da Corona and Jacques-Louis David) had done so, is the subsequent decision made by King Seleucus to give Stratonice to his son to save the boy’s life. I take it that this is the act which could be described as the father’s ‘melting’. And yet the ...”

“... to review, let us say fifty years ago, was a study of Fair Rosamond, the mistress of Henry II. The King kept her hidden in a maze at Woodstock but his wife, who had probably been told about Ariadne, tracked down her rival by following a thread or clew, and that was effectively the end of Rosamond, except that she turned up quite often in literature. These ...”

“... bee in the hive is a queen, but the ancients thought they were kings. If the translator has ‘king’, then it will seem very odd to most modern readers; on the other hand, if the translator has ‘queen’, then it will seem normal but produce peculiar results. Faced with this insoluble conundrum, Fallon opts for ‘queen’; Elaine Fantham, in one of ...”

“... The Song of Songs at Paris’s Théâtre des Arts: The opening scene, presenting the meeting of King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, was decorated in purple, the score was of C-major chords and the perfume was incense. Later scenes matched yellow with the scent of hyacinths, green with lily, and so on. The poet Paul Fort remembered that ‘the projections ...”