“... will have died out before the weather warms and the midges start biting again. If it does, it may join the other imported insect-borne diseases that have failed to establish themselves in the UK. The copper ore-carrying sailing ship Hecla brought Aedes aegypti mosquitoes infected with yellow fever virus from Cuba to Swansea in 1865. It docked on 9 ...”

“... paintings of the 1990s are just that. In pictures of winter weather from the 1990s blobs of snow may spatter the air, obscuring a scene. Reflections on ice and the bare branches of trees create patterns that slow your reading. On some, seen close to, you find a sparse scattering of little blobs of bright colour like bits of chopped up cherry in a cake mix ...”

“... often and nervously, with the memory of an expanding and contracting shadow, although that memory may be an overlay, an extrapolation from things seen since such as the MRI scans in the Heart exhibition – at the Wellcome until 16 September. As much about the heart in the mind as about the heart in the body, the exhibition encourages introspection. A series ...”

“... On 1 May, only five days after news broke that a 73-year-old man, Josef Fritzl, had immured one of his seven children, his 18-year-old daughter Elisabeth, in a specially fortified cellar under his house in the small town of Amstetten in Lower Austria, and kept her there for 24 years, abusing her persistently and fathering seven more children on her, Elfriede Jelinek, Austria’s Nobel Prize winning novelist, posted a short essay on her website under the title ‘Im Verlassenen ...”

“... drawing plentifully on interviews with the important players, including Mishal. The Mishal affair may not be as much of a turning point in the conflict as McGeough claims, but its wider resonances are striking. More than a decade later, Mishal is Hamas’s political chief in Damascus, and Netanyahu, the man who ordered his assassination, is back in power in ...”

“... again. I trust that what I did was not wrong. I trust that I have harmed no one I love. The worst may be that I have put myself into a position where I may be forced to lie. In 1964, Cheever invited the writer Paul Moor, who was a fan of his work, up to his hotel room in Berlin. ‘I think he was or ...”

“... strange somatic symptoms he connected to stress, but was unable to explain physiologically. It may be that the terror of charging into heavy enemy fire at close range as a lone unprotected figure in the open formations of the Civil War, as opposed to the tight square formations of earlier military tactics, induced something like shellshock and contributed ...”

“... by no means arcane, one of his finest things, which was delivered in King’s College Chapel on 11 May 1986. The passage reads: God’s silent searching flight, When my Lord’s head is fill’d with dew, and all His locks are wet with the clear drops of night; His still, soft call; His knocking-time; the soul’s dumb watch, When spirits their fair kindred ...”

“... decent heat or light or plumbing’ – Izvestia had a point, however desirable those slums may have looked by comparison with the Soviet Union’s urban housing. ‘Let’s see if we can’t clear up what a slum is,’ Izvestia’s editors challenged. The change in her perspective on this question came when she started writing for Architectural Forum ...”

“... in behind Saddam Hussein, providing Exocets and fighter aircraft to Baghdad; French companies may even have supplied the regime with precursor elements for chemical weapons. Saleh had all the hallmarks of an undercover operator in the service of a foreign power, taking the fight to its enemies.After ten years of relative calm, France was the target of ...”

“... got it right when he said in a 1998 interview that Roots is a ‘work of the imagination’. This may be the reason it captured the imagination of millions and why genealogical work began a new phase of expansion. New organisations were founded, such as the Afro-American Historical and Genealogical Society in May 1977 and ...”

“... a forerunner of returning wisdom.’ I have no experience of royal persons, some of whom I think may still ‘what-what’ a little. Today, though, it’s easier. What royalty wants nowadays is deference without awe, though what they get more often than not is a fatuous smile, any social awkwardness veiled in nervous laughter so that the Queen moves among ...”

“... most theoretical) of Empson’s books will have something to say even to the young, who may suppose that really serious rhetorical analysis only got going in the late Sixties. However, The Royal Beasts is not criticism, though it shows the intellectual force of the critical books of the Thirties, and sometimes reminds us of them. It is striking, for ...”

“... one. By all accounts he was very good at it. The final national servicemen were demobilised in May 1963, just a few days before Profumo confessed to the House of Commons that he had lied about the nature of his relationship with Christine Keeler. After Profumo’s resignation, there were two further, short-lived secretaries of state for war (Joseph Godber ...”

“... not sexuality itself, merely to say that all art draws on some universal reservoir of desire that may as well be called utopian is neither political nor utopian. This means that when Groys praises his postutopians for illustrating in different ways the indifferent law that art seeks power, he is avoiding any politics of art except perhaps of the most ...”