“... if sub rosa, drink with Maria.And then there are the teasing hints that unexpected things may happen – before we’re invariably let down. In the lead-up to the wedding Archie and Luke have a final confrontation, and Dolan presents us with three possible ways it could go. They fight; they part, sadly but wisely; they are interrupted by the phone ...”

“... could be a little, well, shapelier. Don’t you wear a brassiere?’Her characters may express animus towards Freud, if they’re interested in him at all, but Taubes presents the father-daughter relationship as the original site of self-alienation. How can a girl develop a sense of self when confronted with a philosophical framework that turns ...”

“... water and full-spectrum white light cannot explain every shimmer and break in real rainbows, which may be subject to, for example, filtered sunlight, larger or smaller raindrops and drops flattened by their fall through the air. In 1838, George Biddell Airy published a ‘complete theory’ of the rainbow but, despite giving a good mathematical description of ...”

“... First/Bunny died, then John Latouche,/then Jackson Pollock,’ Frank O’Hara reflects during a post-prandial stroll around midtown Manhattan in ‘A Step away from Them’, written in August 1956. Everyone knew Jackson Pollock and the lyricist John Latouche, but only insiders to the avant-garde coteries in which O’Hara moved would have known who Bunny was – especially since she published under the name V ...”

“... condensed milk or cabbages, even if her family were starving (as, at bad times in the 1920s, she may have feared they might). She did not need what she stole. She could not have sold the books. She couldn’t even let anyone know she had them. She couldn’t risk taking them back. All she could do, as best she could, was read the damn things.When I knew ...”

“... was meant as a score for painting, poetry, objects, events or music, although these categories may also be a provocation in themselves (if you’re burying a cloud in the garden, is it an event or a poem?). Ono’s own subversive gestures have been recuperated by the institutions at which they were directed. In the winter of 1971, she placed adverts in ...”

“... North African sands, obliged to throw themselves on the Carthaginians’ mercy. History and legend may be more reliable prognosticators than the promises of a fictional god. Troy fell; Carthage fell; why should Rome be any different?The Roman Empire reached its greatest extent under Trajan, nearly 150 years after Virgil’s death, in the early years of ...”

“... her up.’ When we refuse, and ask them why they do not give her some deadly poison each day that may not prove more destructive, they, of course, think us demented.One dreadful mother, Flynt wrote, insisted that her daughter’s waist ‘must not measure over eighteen inches’ for her coming-out party and used French corsets to shrink her. The consequences ...”

“... 973.) Biruni’s reticence about his origins has led modern scholars to speculate that he may have been orphaned or abandoned, or even (depending on the interpretation of a contemporary poem) that he was the illegitimate son of royalty. He was taken up at a young age by the Iraq family, who governed Khwarazm on behalf of the Samanids of Bukhara and ...”

“... his secret: he was a biological woman – now honoured liturgically as St Marina.Marinos, who may have lived in the fifth century in what is now Lebanon, is one of more than thirty transgender monks commemorated in Byzantine and Western texts. Many are revered as saints. Despite an explicit biblical prohibition on cross-dressing, reinforced by canon ...”

“... I grew up about 45 minutes from Athlone. Broderick must have visited the village where I lived; he may even have sat in the church where I was once an altar girl.In the opening chapter of The Pilgrimage, Michael and his wife, Julia, sit in their living room with Father Victor, the local priest, and Michael’s nephew Jim, a doctor. The group is organising a ...”

“... window glass and tapestries. This enthusiasm for foreign wares sometimes provoked unrest. On Evil May Day in 1517, London apprentices and journeymen, wound to fury by a campaign of xenophobic rhetoric, rioted in protest against a perceived influx of foreign craftsmen. Thomas Elyot complained in his Boke Named the Governour that the English did not encourage ...”

“... majority in the House in November 2026. Even a slight advantage gained through redistricting may have national implications because the Democrats’ lead in the polls is consistently small (around two points). Congressional maps are usually redrawn once every ten years, after each decennial census (the next one is in 2030). Mid-cycle redistricting does ...”

“... be quite unembarrassed by his desire for worldly success and power, along with the luxuries that may come with them. It is in his dress rather than his language – Podhoretz’s writing is almost always elegantly phrased and supple, closer to Henry James than to Damon Runyon – that he likes to announce his lower-class affiliations. There is a pattern of ...”

“... have little or nothing to do with either the technical imperatives of interdependence – which may even have been less at mid-century than fifty years earlier – or the ethereal visions of a handful of federalist worthies. They were rather a product of the common disaster of the Second World War, when every nation-state between the Pyrenees and the North ...”