“... to say hokey) throughout: ‘Ah, the fickleness of love and hate in Baroque Rome’; ‘Bernini may have been expert in the carving of angels, but he was far from one himself.’ The account is pegged to the works of art, presented more or less in chronological order, but Mormando is clear that he is writing a biography, not art history. He is at his best ...”

“... to meet them – thus engineering its exclusion. De Soto resigned from the UN soon afterwards. It may seem odd that other EU member states should have acquiesced so readily to the 2003 switch to a militarised solution, but Blair’s approach proved hard to resist. Schisms in the lead-up to the Iraq war had left the EU badly weakened. The instinct of men such ...”

“... Octavian’s will to power and his genius for grasping it, they were not alone. Or again, it may be that Cleopatra actually got things right, correctly reading Octavian’s implacability early on and sticking with Antony to the end because, even after he no longer looked like a winner, there was no viable alternative. It was Antony who, in his dogged ...”

“... of his artistic ambitions, whether he’s able to realise them or not. Indeed, that earnestness may be an obstacle to their achievement, if Palo Alto is any indication. His upcoming Hollywood parts are a mixed bag: next is Your Highness, a medieval comedy in which he’ll probably be funny, followed by Rise of the Apes, a Planet of the Apes prequel that ...”

“... with his novels of the 1970s: ‘I knew I wasn’t doing utterly serious work.’ That may be why his new collection begins in 1979, omitting as much of his published short fiction as it includes. The culture had changed, and so had DeLillo’s writing. The hippies of the hinterlands and the freaks in Times Square had ceded their place at the ...”

“... attest that the drones have inflamed public opinion across Pakistan as well as Afghanistan. It may be true, as Obama has claimed, that ‘most of al-Qaida’s top lieutenants have been defeated,’ but we don’t know who has replaced them. In Afghanistan, large numbers of local Taliban leaders have been killed, only to be replaced, so local observers ...”

“... FTO, leads to just a 3kg weight difference – the suggestion here is that environmental factors may be more significant than genetics in determining obesity. Douglas’s study of 1946 and Golding’s of 1991 have been primarily interested in medical data; they have been funded largely, if patchily, by the Medical Research Council. The 1958 and 1970 cohort ...”

“... enough to produce these effects was intense reading. Modern readers of Julie and Pamela, however, may find it surprising that these novels in particular could induce any physical effects besides a narcotic one. Our current sensibilities do not generally take well to their massive helpings of undiluted sentiment. But as literary historians have long pointed ...”

“... was America. ‘It’s true there are some misguided boys,’ the principal said, ‘and they may be the ones threatening us, but it is America that has bombed their homes.’ The list of grievances against America is long: Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo, the civilian death toll in Iraq, Afghanistan and increasingly in Pakistan itself. I am writing this in ...”

“... home town, Sarajevo: like Hemon himself, who was due to fly home from a trip to the States on 1 May 1992, the day before the Bosnian Serbs completed their blockade. Brik is a writer too, who earns nothing and is grimly uncomfortable in his American Dream marriage to a brain surgeon who makes all their money. So he applies for a grant to research the 1908 ...”

“... take into account the dialectical totality of the situation.’ The singularity of human suffering may reach a level at which the easy reference to totality turns into cynicism. The only argument for the war against Iraq was repeatedly put by Christopher Hitchens: the majority of Iraqis were victims of Saddam and were glad to get rid of him. To this ...”

“... that we have a Republican president spending madly on controversial and dangerous causes, history may well be kinder to Clinton. History is unlikely, however, to look more kindly on Kenneth Starr and the people who kept him going, or on the other members of the much touted right-wing conspiracy that devoted huge amounts of time and money to trying to bring ...”

“... clinic was notorious for cruelly ingenious contrivances to control and ‘cure’ the insane. By May the following year, Autenrieth, having concluded that Hölderlin’s illness was incurable, and assuming that he had at most three years to live, released him into the care of Ernst Zimmer, a local carpenter. Zimmer inhabited what had been part of the old ...”

“... REFA together and Maudling actively touted its fraudulent prospectus to his contacts. Poulson may have been a crook but after just one look at the REFA brochure he threw it away and took care to distance himself from this transparent scam. Next, one finds Maudling involved with Sir Eric Miller, he of the Wilson honours list and endless crooked ...”

“... the relation in which these poems stand to the originals’. Their fluent and alert English may have veiled the fact, but it was impossible to forget that they had been translated: the references to Unamuno and other friends of Machado’s saw to that, as did the vivid at-homeness of the poems in what was unmistakably their own Spanish landscape. Such ...”