“... anything in the way of description or biography. With so little to modulate 642 pages, readers may sometimes feel on a bit of a forced march themselves, and Mikaberidze’s penchant for commonplaces doesn’t help (e.g. ‘India has been described by 19th-century contemporaries as the “jewel in the crown” of the British Empire’).The book has a ...”

“... technology to get ahead of the virus was already here, we thought. We just needed to deploy it.By May there were more than fifty new testing methods either published in journals or deposited on the BioRxiv pre-print server, an open access repository for papers in the biological sciences. People came up with some great ideas. A group in San Francisco developed ...”

“... rises. They asked the king to ensure that ‘all people, of whatever estate or condition they may be, may freely determine their consumption of victuals and apparel for themselves, their wives, children and servants in the manner that seems best to them for their own profit.’ The joyful consumerism continued for ...”

“... it. They did greedily eat rocks.’ One might wonder where he managed to find ostriches, but he may have encountered them in the menagerie of Frederick II, the Holy Roman Emperor, who kept a travelling zoo that also included peacocks, camels, leopards, lynxes, apes, lions, giraffes and even an elephant with a wooden tower on its back. Albert’s treatment ...”

“... he said. He spent much of his time away from court, writing to his mother that he ‘faced, if I may say so, no opponent other than Your Majesty yourself’. Power was not shared equally: Maria Theresa made the decisions. But Joseph refused to give his assent if he disagreed, though his mother saw such refusals as betrayals. Numerous reports refer to her ...”

“... Sinn Féin looks set to become the largest party in the assembly following elections on 5 May. O’Neill may well become first minister – the first nationalist to hold the post. Donaldson has said this would be a ‘real problem’ for unionists.In times of crisis, unionism reverts to the Lundy principle. This has ...”

“... to Seleucus in the early days of 285. He spent his remaining years as a captive. Demetrius may sound like a biographer’s dream. But he has often been dismissed as an ‘also ran’ among the big personalities of the Hellenistic era, a mercurial general whose excesses got the better of him, or as nothing more than a ‘mirror’ of his time. Pat ...”

“... men doing their unheroic best in an impossible situation, would have been anathema to him. Namier may have helped to erect a fresh 20th-century myth, but in his Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III (1929) and England in the Age of the American Revolution (1930) he satisfyingly laid another to rest. The Whig interpretation, elaborated by ...”

“... in a primarily familial setting. To privilege the private over the public as such critics do may be interpreted as a feminist gesture. But it’s a self-limiting challenge, for their language often chooses to exclude the wider community, operating in terms of jokes and quarrels shared within a closely-knit intellectual family. The repressive fathers are ...”

“... unloved son can go free, like his wicked father. The tale has, at least, human interest. This book may be compared with other century-hopping collections, published just before and just after the First World War. There were Kipling’s vivid stories of Sussex life through the ages, and then there was John Buchan’s The Path of the King, tracing ancestral ...”

“... less than three years later, the lid that New Delhi pushed down over the Kashmir issue for so long may finally have blown off.) The exchange between Nargis Dutt and Ray’s supporters, the quarrel between the philistine/commercial/jingoistic position and the aesthete/purist/open-eyed view, can be seen in a number of different ways: as a quarrel between two ...”

“... of dusk, a rainbow – all these became subjects. He suffered from depression, and dark themes may have been congenial. He was a friend of industrialists, men of science and engineers, and the kind of light which so suited his talent was also that by which the soooty, noisy business of manufacture became dramatic. The best portraits are of men and women ...”

“... itself within the heritage of prior translations, is a radically hermeneutic act. Translations may, indeed, be the most immediate of critical-interpretative means. The more so when they are the work of poet-scholars such as C. Day-Lewis and Robert Fitzgerald or of so remarkable a stylist as Jackson Knight (time and again, one finds oneself reverting to his ...”

“... to anger at the sight of their smiling faces, cuffing and hustling them away from the cameras.9 May. Miss Shepherd’s funeral is at Our Lady of Hal, the Catholic church round the corner. The service has been slotted into the ten o’clock Mass so that, in addition to a contingent of neighbours, the congregation includes what I take to be regulars: the fat ...”

“... about whom rather less is known. In general, though, Sontag does her homework thoroughly: and this may well point to one very basic reason why she has selected the apparently bizarre literary form of a historical novel. As Balzac put it, characters in ordinary novels have to be roused to life by their inventors. But historical characters have already ...”