“... air, light – ‘dewy vapour and sunshine’ in the case of Cuyp – which cannot be owned or held. Dutch genre paintings, on the other hand, do record with love and care a good deal of immaculate opulence and in many still-lives we are presented with piles of luxury goods. The treasures painted by Kalf nestling against rumpled Turkey carpets on marble ...”

“... have been brooding on the hollowness of its victory already). In general, I think he has always held practically everybody at arm’s length. The narrative of the book is marked by a superficiality which goes beyond being merely unobservant or indifferent. And it becomes baffling and ultimately infuriating as one reads on. As I said earlier, he knew (and ...”

“... grown in fame and distinction, and moved in governing circles on both sides of the Atlantic, and held four chairs including the Regius Professorship of Modern History at Oxford from 1981 to 1989, his career has been all of a piece. The scholar, the actor, the dashing young subaltern and the Union debater, have all gone into the making of this extremely ...”

“... Gallant has been offered a regular platform under the benign aegis of William Maxwell and, later, David Menaker. Although they span almost half a century – the earliest was published in 1953, the latest in 1995, Gallant’s 73rd year – they are nonetheless eerily consistent in voice and preoccupation. Gallant writes about exiled people: characters in ...”

“... post. Its manufacturing process, which was an inconvenience to the New Zealand printers, held the key to the accident which created the ‘Lake Taupo’. On one occasion between the years 1902 and 1904 a printer was careless and passed the paper through the press for the second time the wrong way round. There was therefore a sheet of 80 4d Pictorials ...”

“... to more dramatic revelations in the Guardian and on Granada’s World in Actionprogramme, Aitken held a press conference in Tory Central Office. It fell to him, he intoned, to take up what he called ‘the simple sword of truth and the trusty shield of British fair play’ against the ‘cancer of bitter and twisted journalism’. He sued for libel. This was ...”

“... government.’ The media rallied to his call, and so did less likely allies. The novelist David Grossman went on TV to urge a ‘unity government’ of Likud and Blue and White. ‘Hatred will wait for better days … we need an emergency unity government now,’ Aviv Geffen, a rock star and once a leading peace activist, said in an op-ed. Even the ...”

“... David Soren​ of the University of Arizona was excavating the remains of a villa just outside Lugnano in Umbria in 1992 when he uncovered a fifth-century mass grave: 47 small skeletons had been interred in layers, some pressed into large amphorae. A number of them were newborn babies. The deepest layer held only a corpse or two, but the higher levels were increasingly populated ...”

“... for the Ashkenazi-dominated Labour Party: to have within its highest ranks a ‘Moroccan’ who held such views was in those days almost unthinkable. Since then, Peretz, like the other members of the Eight, has become more ‘pragmatic’ – as we say in Israel – in an attempt to shift Israel’s Zionist politics towards the centre. In the 1990s, he ...”

“... are still in evidence:        Causing the charm, the pause never so alertly        held abeyantly to flood entire        its moderate premium diving like a crashed star in salt water, outbroken fire. In Prynne’s poems we find metamorphoses, spectacular and menacing natural phenomena, manmade disasters and cosmic ructions tapering down ...”

“... Fish. Fish’s salaries and lecture fees have been part of the lore of academic culture since David Lodge’s Changing Places (1975), where he appeared thinly disguised as Morris Zapp, who, ‘enviably offered his first job by Euphoria State, had stuck out for twice the going salary, and got it’; and who had ‘the professional killer instinct’ in a ...”

“... species’. But Wires believes that the bird’s ‘athleticism and effectiveness’ are being held against it, for while it is extremely successful at catching fish, its rate of consumption relative to body mass is no higher than that of many other species, and lower than some. Cormorants are opportunistic feeders, and often catch ‘trash fish’, not ...”

“... to support as many family members as possible, at the expense of productivity. Early modern states held that the elderly were the responsibility of their relations. In England, the Poor Law of 1601 stated that ‘the father and grandfather, mother and grandmother and children of every poor, old, blind, lame and impotent person, or other poor person not able to ...”

“... great deal about access to holy places. As a ten-year-old altar boy in a Carmelite convent, he had held the position of ‘gatekeeper’, so that whenever a novice took the veil and vanished behind the walls for good, it was the hand of a future Marxist literary theorist which opened, then fatefully closed, the portals. As the title of his memoir ...”

“... But in his own eyes he remained the gangling, untidy public school rebel, still recognisable in David Hockney’s official portrait of him as Provost. ‘Quirky, unpredictable, a believer that truth emerges from contradiction, a roughneck in argument’, according to Noel Annan, his predecessor as Provost of King’s. His friend Audrey Richards said that he ...”