“... the descriptions and copies of later generations. Fidia, at the Capitoline Museums in Rome until 5 May, is the first exhibition dedicated to the Athenian sculptor Phidias, celebrated in his lifetime for the statue of Zeus at Olympia but best known today for his work on the Acropolis.We know that he was born in Athens around 500 BC and was still active in the ...”

“... Modern revisits that original exploration with Nigerian Modernism: Art and Independence (until 10 May). ‘Modernism’ in this context means the shift in visual art brought about by colonialism in the 19th and early 20th centuries, during which easel painting and European art history became widely disseminated, and as a reaction to colonial rule and its ...”

“... of Payne Knight’s collection, not to mention the range of genres represented, suggests that it may have been assembled as a comprehensive historical survey. Payne Knight and his fellow collector Clayton Mordaunt Cracherode were among the first in Europe to bequeath their private collections of drawings to a public institution. Both were ahead of their ...”

“... by the Lorraine poet Henry Humbert’s loss of his eyesight. But on further inspection, this clue may be misleading. Humbert’s verse sequence is a set of howls against his descent into ‘appalling night’. By contrast, La Tour’s darknesses are affirmative ushers to concentration.We know at least that their reputation spread to Paris, where Louis XIII ...”

“... at least, the best popularisers have themselves been scientists is that, however interested they may be in politics or history or philosophy, their first love is science itself. Stephen Gould is deeply aware of the social setting in which scientists work, but he does really care about the science they do. Like me, he fell in love with dinosaurs when he was a ...”

“... never the slightest suspicion of obscenity or profanity in the dialogue. Here again, no doubt, we may detect the hand of R.C. Sherriff, for Brickhill makes clear that Squadron Leader Guy Gibson was married, and that the men under his command had normal heterosexual interests. One of the neatest touches in the screenplay comes when Gibson and his chief bombing ...”

“... As Keynes himself wrote in his essay on Isaac Newton, ‘geniuses are very peculiar,’ and it may be the case that no academic account can fully recapture Keynes’s extraordinary mixture of grossness and sensitivity, intuition and logical power. A playwright might do it, as has been done for Luther, Galileo and Danton, but not the polite and inanimate ...”

“... a house which can also accommodate Nicholas when he is not living with his mother in New York. In May I went back to America to receive an honorary degree from Bard, a small Liberal Arts College at Annandale on the Hudson. I had taught there for one day a week in 1948, as a means of supplementing my salary as a Visiting Professor at New York University. I ...”

“... readers – to express what is often thought but feminist cant refuses to acknowledge. Jacqueline may end up being slightly more self-assured about herself and her bum, but the real happiness of her denouement, we understand, has to do with bagging a nice bloke. As someone who has written more than her fair share of ‘girl’s life’ columns in her ...”

“... seem to get their digestion right. The monkey incident worries Abhay’s parents. They fear it may cause a riot at the nearby temple of Hanuman, the monkey god who is also the god of poetry. Besides, they are fond of the monkey. So they bring him in and nurse him while he lies unconscious, with occasional confused memories of his former incarnation as a ...”

“... stories upon stories’ with a nostalgia for innocent, childhood reading experiences it may be because the official narratives of Western culture, like the Bible and Homer, tend to be historical and chronological rather than merely accumulative. Before the 20th century the influence of our greatest model of the heaped, embedded narrative – the ...”

“... unprepossessing. Most chimps doubt that they are intelligent, or even sentient. Feral humans may have a language, but if they do it’s rudimentary. In the whole course of the novel, none of them says anything except ‘fuck off.’ That, however, is something that they say very often. It’s not always certain that Self knows when he isn’t being ...”

“... loyalty was to the King personally, and express great contempt for the German Emperor, although it may well be that these are sentiments picked up from a prevailing climate of British opinion. The 127th Baluchis, whose trenches were only a few yards away from the German lines, took to throwing stones at the enemy, which were promptly returned. ‘It is a fine ...”

“... Israel, with Britain and the US, has always claimed: if a leader is democratically elected, he may and even should, wage war against peoples that don’t have democracy or strong armies, or weapons of mass destruction. Let’s see our ailing Refuseniks try to accuse our generals of war crimes now, just for uprooting a few thousand olive trees. Who except ...”

“... Even better, her great-grandmother, Alice Keppel, was Edward VII’s official mistress. It may be more than mere chance that the role of maîtresse-en-titre to the Prince of Wales runs in the family. Tyrrel says that, as a child, Camilla not only knew about her ancestor’s liaison but regarded the story as ‘talismanic’, and loved to brag about it ...”