“... bone’, ‘snuffed out Rachel Plummer’s infant/(nursing was lost time)’. But for the poet it may not be too late. Her son’s hair has ‘grown for the better part/ – a thousand pardons – of a year’, his ‘leonine’ locks raised, we suppose, in one kind of captivity. Submitting them to the barber’s shears means surrendering him to another ...”

“... Don​ McCullin’s retrospective at Tate Britain (until 6 May) is proof that it pays for a photojournalist covering victims of conflict and hardship to get up close: not quite eyeball to eyeball, but near enough to suggest a portrait. Most of McCullin’s photographs ask us to look frankly at the human face, and often our gaze is reciprocated ...”

“... under Sergei Diaghilev – ‘Big Serge’, as she always called him – or about her husband ‘May-nar’ (with the emphasis on the second syllable).Lydia lived in a substantial house called Tilton at the foot of Firle Beacon, one of the highest of the South Downs. It was set among farm buildings, a pond and a handful of cottages. It could be reached from ...”

“... before Paris, it continues to change. In 2017 it acquired a new wing, by Bernard Desmoulin, and in May this year it reopened after a two-year refurbishment. The west front of Desmoulin’s building, its brown-gold façades in anodised aluminium, panelled and pierced to create a varying effect in changing light, give Cluny a newly confident presence, allowing ...”

“... in college. But there was a problem: all Kaepernick ever wanted to do was play football.The NFL may be a slave system, but as Kaepernick saw it, baseball was just as bad and in some ways worse. It is a sport that has bought into its own mythology. The young Kaepernick was constantly being reminded that baseball must be played in the true spirit of the ...”

“... space-filling stability of three times four? In other words, the first term of Twelve Caesars may have ‘mattered’ to European visual culture no less than the second. If so, Beard’s theme isn’t necessarily diminished, but it is repositioned. She only glancingly relates her emperor images to the saint images of the Twelve Apostles. But surely ...”

“... the hope that these will help them to track down one of the two surviving bombers. A bit late, you may think, given that the bombings took place nearly fifty years ago, and my investigation, which led to the release of six innocent men, was concluded in 1991. What kept them so long? The short answer is that for many years the West Midlands Police, in common ...”

“... for the expatriate Iraqi opposition, it has always been a motley bunch. Its leader Ahmad Chalabi may be a brilliant man but he has been found guilty of fraud in Jordan and has no real constituency beyond Paul Wolfowitz’s Pentagon office. He and his helpers – Kanan Makiya, for example, the man who said that news of the merciless high-altitude US bombing ...”

“... by the Doors. I also remember the quasi-adult intimation that this wasn’t possible. Which may have been why the first strains of ‘Emily’, even then, marked the onset of sulkiness and regret; the thing you adored was eluding you even as you heard it. Roll on teatime. Willis tells me I’d have gone to see Pink Floyd at Middle Earth, a cult club in ...”

“... gun. Cluke tires of Bob’s long-winded accounts of his experiences (a view with which the reader may sympathise) and tells him to hurry up. Meanwhile, Bob decides that he wants to see the inside of a hog farm, and tries to break into one. He is arrested. Cluke summons him back to Denver and presents him with an ultimatum: either he acquires two properties by ...”

“... the jewel of Beirut has little chance. It’s possible to be charitable about Solidere. Brashness may be the only way to get things done. ‘Nobody agrees on anything here’ is something all Beirutis agree on. (One downtown building had 4080 owners and 780 tenants.) ‘But you can’t reconstruct a city and exclude its inhabitants from the ...”

“... But these are college-age children, who certainly have their own angsts: their mother may be about to leave their father; and among the hyper-sensitive population of Bending Heaven, it’s unlikely that anyone’s sleep is ...”

“... he escaped, not to be seen again until a great whale appeared in Manly Cove. The creature, which may have entered the harbour to give birth, had upset a rowing boat, drowning several marines. A few of their comrades, fancying themselves as amateur whalers, set out for revenge and fatally wounded the creature. When its carcass washed up in the cove, it ...”

“... by initiating the publication of his collected works. On the 400th anniversary of his death, in May 1943, the Nazis seized the opportunity to reassert German ownership of Nicolaus Koppernick and to assert that the Poles were intellectually too weak to have produced so great a genius. The Allies claimed Mikulaj Kopernik for Occupied Poland, and as an icon of ...”

“... Just discard the sordid part. Consider us pure symbol. We’re no more real than money. This may seem to be spelling things out, an attack on crudeness and cruelty that is itself too crude; but that last sentence – ‘we’re no more real than money’ – is complex, and sometimes a blunt instrument is the right one. As Penelope says of ...”