“... position. As for the suggestion that altarpieces were an aid to prayer and good conduct, images may well have been relevant to prayer, but not to good conduct, for which stories provided countless relevant examples. None of these considerations, in fact, tells us much or indeed anything at all about the motives of the patrons. Neither does Ekserdjian’s ...”

“... too quickly. ‘Is it conceivable,’ he once wondered, ‘that (by a strange Nemesis) a parodist may become his own original? Can type and anti-type, parody and anti-parody be thus combined in one person and one poem?’ Inside Clough’s most scathing ironies there’s an uncertainty about who is getting the better of whom. It led him to put some of his ...”

“... it has often proved the most useful gift of all.’ Cleaning is an enjoyment, they imply, that may increase the yield of other enjoyments, and, to the post-Victorian ear, there is something sad in the discovery that most of life’s basic enjoyments, for Mrs Beeton, were held by her to bring a solitary duty of care to the objects involved. On satin ...”

“... settled at Olympia by a process of arbitration. A seated Zeus, a judge rather than a warrior, may have held special appeal for the people of Elis, who administered the site. Olympia’s excavation records show a huge number of metal weights inscribed with dedications to Zeus, far more than have been found elsewhere in Greece. Perhaps, Barringer ...”

“... it didn’t serve Stettheimer well in the end. Ettie, the only Stettheimer who wrote books, may have anticipated what kind of diary would support scholarship worthy of her sister. Rather than seeing her as a bitter prude ripping out pages by the fistful, we might see her as judiciously removing the sex and gossip that have distracted from the work of ...”

“... a war whose technology was even more impersonally brutal than his own military prowess. There you may still look down on the face of one of the earliest military tomb effigies in Europe. If we are familiar with the medieval monuments which now jostle each other in churches, we tend to forget how startling and novel this figure of a recumbent knight would have ...”

“... once it was bandaged up by a prison officer. She felt, she said, like a craftsman. It may not have been quite what she intended – it looked ‘as if half my chest had been hacked open’ – but it did the job. She was transferred from the hospital wing to the main prison, where she felt she belonged. The puzzle of Lady Constance Lytton’s life ...”

“... on an upbeat note, suggesting that uprisings among workers at Walmart and other low-wage retailers may ‘break through the ossified remains of the old trade-union apparatus and seed the growth of wholly new organisations of the invisibles’. People are still inspired not only by material wants but also by ‘ineffable yearnings to redefine what it means to ...”

“... of hordes of extras in 1930s costumes, period cars and trucks. One signal of a turning point may have been Khrzhanovsky’s construction in 2008 of a full-size partial replica of а giant Soviet passenger plane, the Kalinin K-7, at Kharkiv airport. In the real world a prototype of the seven-engined, double-tailed behemoth was built in Kharkiv in 1933 and ...”

“... away from home. That she also proved a devoted wife and mother changes nothing. Domestic claims may have weighed on her and limited her freedom, but they never crippled it. Scholars have long agreed that Stowe drew much of her political and social vision from her sense of the superiority of domestic relations over those of the marketplace that increasingly ...”

“... ungulates on which the local economy almost entirely depends. But spring brought no relief; by mid-May there was still no sign of the gu rains. The grass never grew and the animals starved. Here and there, outside a cluster of patchwork tents, we passed a field that had been tilled. The earth had been turned and perhaps planted – even meagre rains can be ...”

“... more violent display of anger, and was more than ever determined to march against Hellas.’ We may suspect a calculated public display here. The purpose of the Persian expedition had been to inflict what was held to be justified punishment for the arson and sacrilege at Sardis, and these offences were still unavenged. It is very likely though that Darius ...”

“... secure his precious three votes. In the end, South Africa won the final bidding round 14-10, so we may infer that the trip was a success. But subsequent rumours that $10 million also found its way from South Africa to Trinidad may have had something to do with it. As David Conn writes in his exemplary history of recent high ...”

“... to a madrasa in Pakistan, where he intended to memorise the Quran. His parents heard from him in May 2001; he told them he wanted to move somewhere cooler for the summer. In December that year he was among a group of soldiers captured by the Northern Alliance: he had been training with al-Qaida and serving as a guard for the Taliban. Distanced from the ...”

“... neglect of specific territories or constituencies resulting in unforeseen explosions of dissent. May 1968 is the clearest instance of the latter, but both models have remained in evidence: examples include the rejection of Mitterrand’s attempted reform of private schools in 1984, the demonstrations against Juppé’s welfare reforms in 1995, the revolts of ...”