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“... put it pretty high on any list of the characteristics of poetic language. How did metaphor become king of the rhetorical figures? The most obvious answer to that question is ‘because it always has been’. Aristotle said in the Poetics that the ability to create metaphors was ‘a sign of natural gifts, since to use metaphor well is to discern ...”

“... inside and outside the Middle East and Africa as a reason for state weakness. ‘Corruption,’ John Kerry said in May, ‘is as much of an enemy, because it destroys nation-states, as some of the extremists we are fighting.’ This is certainly true in Iraq, where military officers traditionally buy their jobs with the help of a large loan, which they pay ...”

“... mounted under glass, Gehad turned to his colleague Yvona Trnka-Amrhein and the Euripides expert John Gibert, both professors of classics at the University of Colorado Boulder, to decipher the text (it has just been published in the Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik). The papyrus was probably produced in the third century ce at the height of the ...”

“... them himself ... It so happens that this thumbnail portrait fits Andrew’s younger brother, John Matthew, who was educated at Stonyhurst, better than it does Andrew himself, who was brought up by a private tutor at Marbot Hall. But what it describes is one half of the English experience Hildesheimer presents, the foil against which the other half ...”

“... Among the illustrations in this book is a painting by John Closterman of the Marlborough family which hangs today in Blenheim Palace. On its right-hand side, as convention dictates, sits the head of the family, John Churchill, at the time of the painting, first Earl of Marlborough ...”

“... in history are all the rage – nowhere more so than in the study of the English Civil Wars. John Morrill, that panjandrum of Civil War revisionism, is reported to have advised a recent meeting of the Royal Historical Society to think of 1640-60 not as the first of Europe’s modern revolutions but as the last of its wars of religion. J.T. Cliffe’s ...”

“... 9.1), cleansing lepers (Matthew 8.1-4), feeding thousands (Luke 9.10-17) and raising the dead (John 11.1-43), but I never quite managed any of those, and had to make do with speaking in tongues (Acts 2.4), having visions (Acts 2.17) and receiving words of wisdom (1 Corinthians 12.8) instead.* I was 17 years old when I started. I was from Essex. I’d ...”

“... and teachers. Not since the publication of the central texts of the modern history of slavery, John Hope Franklin’s From Slavery to Freedom in 1947 and Kenneth Stampp’s The Peculiar Institution in 1956, has any serious history book claimed that slavery was a benign paternalistic institution. No one has argued that it was anything other than the great ...”

“... roughly to the duration of his relationships with three different women: his first wife, Mary King, whom Day Lewis married in 1928 (politics); his lover, Rosamond Lehmann, with whom he began an affair in 1941 (eros); and his second wife, Jill Balcon, who he married in 1951, six days after divorcing Mary (thanatos). It is undoubtedly a beautiful theory; so ...”

“... the great proconsuls, but young men representatively on the loose – James Brooke of Sarawak, John and Henry Lawrence of the Punjab, Charles Gordon, Lawrence of Arabia, William Sleeman who destroyed Thuggee, Frederick Lugard who conquered Northern Nigeria. If such men became proconsuls it often diminished rather than brightened their radiance. At that ...”

“... came the Second World War and a sudden upsurge in reputation, with Maurice Bowra, Stephen Spender, John Piper, Kenneth Clark, John Lehmann and others going hysterical about her: a kind of trendy Stringalong situation, we are invited to judge. Then by 1954 it is all over and the balloon deflated for good. Can my dislike of ...”

“... of his public image. His advice to Nell Gwyn (conveyed through Henry Savile) on how to handle the King was ‘with hand, body, head, heart and all the faculties you have, contribute to his pleasure all you can and comply with his desires throughout.’ It is interesting to compare this with ‘A Satyr on Charles II’: His sceptre and his prick are of a ...”

“... with the arts. Elizabeth David, friend of Norman Douglas, is eternalised in the lovely icon of John Ward’s drawing, the epitome of chic in her companionable kitchen. M.F.K. Fisher is just as beautiful. Her most beloved husband was a painter, and her books are so instinct with upmarket bohemianism that it is no surprise to find her in a cameo role in the ...”

“... more recent Erics – Ambler, Sykes, Shipton, Heffer – oozed shame when signing their names. John Betjeman, in Summoned by Bells, agonises over Farrar’s ‘mawkish’ and ‘oh-so-melodious’ book through which runs a schoolboy sense of impending ‘Doom! Shivering Doom!’ The doom which Betjeman and his contemporaries at Marlborough dreaded was no ...”

“... birds and of people. Savage cites at least one scientific study by Tony Angell and several by John Marzluff, the co-authors of a new illustrated book, In the Company of Crows and Ravens. A generalist’s book written by experts, its text considers the role of crows in the human cultural imagination and provides information on their behaviour. Angell’s ...”