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“... It is undeniable that parts of the panel are superbly painted but if Verrocchio was involved in a major way that would make him responsible for the composition. Yet one of the angels seems about to tumble out of the picture and the other (holding a lily as if he was Gabriel in the Annunciation) is uncomfortably situated in space. He also collides awkwardly ...”

“... counter to the slow march of figures, taking the form of silent communication between Christ and John, their contact barred by a stern Roman officer, as the Virgin Mary faints. Some of the later narratives in the nave (scenes from the New Testament twinned with the Old) achieve a similar intensity, reducing the action to minimal but memorable formulae, often ...”

“... a fortnight before, in August 1900, had exacerbated his decline, but eating bananas had been the major cause of death. A lawyer called Albert T. Patrick took charge of the funeral arrangements. On the day after Rice’s death, Patrick tried to have four cheques certified. The cheques, all made out to himself, totalled $250,000, and appeared to have been ...”

“... Since Plato, the major European philosophers, consistent upon almost nothing else, have been united in a sustained denunciation of rhetoric. Brian Vickers’s In Defence of Rhetoric is an attempt, copious, complex, armed at all points with telling examples, to meet and turn back this onslaught, which seems so confidently sure of its own rightness ...”

“... successive British Governments were well aware of this, as were the Unionists. In 1993, however, John Hume’s talks with Gerry Adams reached the point where an unconditional cessation of IRA violence became a real possibility and the Major Government was persuaded by Dublin to open the way for such a development by ...”

“... of old ones. He tends to use ‘genre’ in an indefinite, all-inclusive way; ‘kind’ for the major traditional divisions of the literary spectrum (tragedy, epic etc.); and ‘sub-genre’ for smaller ad hoc divisions. His one important innovation is the meaning he gives to ‘mode’. The names for kinds are nouns – epic, comedy, satire. But they also ...”

“... as ‘The Uneasiness Inherent in Culture’ rather than as Civilisation and Its Discontents. His major dissatisfaction with the standard translation of the title is that it makes it easy to believe that civilisation and discontent are two separate phenomena, instead of, as Freud in fact believed, that Unbehagen (‘uneasiness’) is the price we must pay for ...”

“... making speeches, supporting dismissed Prime Minister Gough Whitlam against Governor-General Sir John Kerr (whom he describes as ‘a rorty farting old Falstaff’), declaring himself a Republican, and writing a play with strong social over-tones. But when the Nobel Prize was awarded to him in 1973 he refused to go to Stockholm to receive it, and the ...”

“... campaign filled with venomous slogans. The differences in political programme between the two major parties did not appear to be that great because the programmes themselves were vague in the extreme. The contest was between images. The Socialists recruited avant-garde artists, progressive rock stars and intellectuals (much more valued in Latin than in ...”

“... and in Scottish history will need to read it and will learn a great deal. There are, however, some major problems. For many, the biggest difficulty will be Fry’s tone and approach. He is an unapologetic Tory, currently a rare breed in Scotland, and sometimes appears eager to anticipate criticism on this score by richly deserving it. His book focuses almost ...”

“... But she and her colleagues continue to search for distinguishing marks of lateness in the work of major artists in their last years, to ask whether they give evidence of failing powers, such as might in the ordinary course of things be expected: senescence; illness; the decay of the senses; the certainty that death, always feared at a distance but now in the ...”

“... the intrigues of his enemies did the family emigrate to Boston. There, Gibran grew up to become a major artistic and political figure. In Paris he knew Debussy, while Rodin went so far as to acclaim him as ‘the Blake of the 20th century’. As it happened, Gibran could remember not only his previous reincarnation as William Blake, but also a subsequent ...”

“... in the subject itself. A poet’s earliest efforts are usually marred by self-consciousness and John Berryman’s are no exception to the rule. For most poets, however, finding a distinct and convincing voice is, at least in part, a process of shedding unwanted affectations and exaggerated self-importance. For Berryman the process was reversed. He learnt to ...”

“... bipolar Kulturkampf, it did leak out to a wide public through the fictions of Len Deighton and John Le Carré. Watching the shadow-play on the walls of the Cold War cave, and seeing the literal interpenetration of opposites as Karla penetrated ‘us’, and ‘we’ reciprocated, one could make the induction that the spy game was a thing in itself, and ...”

“... he left his second wife and children in 2000, and he has made several public appearances in drag.) John McCain has shown himself to be unreliable on terror with his liberal-sounding objections to torture at Guantánamo and is too friendly to illegal immigrants. With Mitt Romney, it’s hard to know which is the more off-putting: that he served as governor of ...”