“... once lush and restrained. Betty de Rothschild’s glorious full pink skirt is set against a rich brown background; she wears pearls and a large ruby, but her pose is informal, her eyes thoughtful. Such paintings illuminate a moment when Jews entered European high society on new terms. They were no longer simply tolerated as the financiers and estate managers ...”

“... In a recent review in this paper, Edward Said used the word ‘narrative’ about thirty times. This might have seemed a lot even in the present state of litcritspeak, and even in an essay on, say, narrative. On this occasion, however, he was writing not about literary texts but about the Palestinian troubles: an affecting topic, on which he writes with eloquence and with a generosity of vision which deserves the respect even of those whose loyalties are opposed to his ...”

“... anti-Edwardian manifesto for the examination of consciousness in fiction, ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’, but the surly provincial in me – dare I say it, my inner Lawrence – can hardly help cheering when he writes: ‘The essay was originally delivered as a paper to a Cambridge undergraduate society, and it reverberates with the mirth of upper-class ...”

“... advice, says Fleming, at any time. Autopsies had yielded some correlations of cause and effect. Edward Jenner (as well as developing the cow-pox vaccine) may have been the first to identify calcification of valves and arteries with angina. He was probably deterred from making this known by fear for his revered teacher, John Hunter, who was already suffering ...”

“... stories. The signal exception is Mulisch’s delicate and crafty novella. Of the shorter pieces, Edward Bond’s ‘Fables’ are predictably but pleasingly pointed and Kenneth White’s two sketches attractively haunted. Time on a Dark River’ revisits Glasgow and mournfully, wittily traces the relics of home, the novelties of geography, the quizzical ...”

“... Robert Edward Lee​ was, in the universal judgment of his contemporaries, a beautiful man. Few Civil War generals inspired such commentary: ‘He stands fully six feet one inch in height,’ a New York Herald reporter wrote, ‘and weighs something over two hundred pounds, without being burdened with a pound of superfluous flesh ...”

“... the demands of miniature painting – that only the dedicated would wish to copy it. Ford Madox Brown used it in Christ Washing Peter’s Feet: ‘painted in four months,’ he tells us, ‘the flesh painted on wet white at Millais’s lying instigation; Roberson’s medium, which I think dangerous like Millais’s advice’. Millais, Holman Hunt and ...”

“... to consider ritual without politics, or indeed, to consider politics without ritual. Professor Edward Muir is also concerned with the political uses of ritual and the political messages it carries. Like Trexler, he has been inspired by the approach to ritual of such anthropologists as Victor Turner and Clifford Geertz, and in any case he knows Trexler’s ...”

“... 1986 celebrations might well have prompted the publication of the second edition of Allen Brown’s The Normans and the Norman Conquest. Originally published in 1969, this book presents the Conquest of England as a part of the Norman ‘expansion’ which also colonised Sicily and Antioch. It is corrective of the Anglo-Saxon propaganda of Freeman and ...”

“... his own sort of creature: giant silken pussy-cat or, as he once described himself to Edward Carpenter, ‘an old hen ... with something in my nature furtive’. Gosse and Carpenter were of course all eager to know what was really going on. But Whitman was less furtive than serene: like any other big animal, he simply had his own complete ...”

“... 2013 may be the year San Francisco turned on Silicon Valley and may be the year the world did too. Edward Snowden’s revelations began to flow in June: Silicon Valley was sharing our private data with the National Security Agency. Many statements were made about how reluctantly it was done, how outraged the executives were, but all the relevant companies ...”

“... Biography, an expansion of Franz Schulze’s definitive 1985 study, co-authored with the architect Edward Windhorst, includes new interviews with Marx. ‘I was hungover most of the time,’ she said of their early years. ‘Mies was fascinated by the fact that I stopped as suddenly as I did, but it didn’t affect the quantity of his intake.’ Schulze and ...”

“... and reached the Colorado River, far to its east. T.S. Eliot’s Mississippi was a ‘strong brown god’: the Colorado River is more like a ruddy writhing serpent. Or was, since the snake has now been chopped into segments by dams, notably by Glen Canyon Dam above the Grand Canyon, and Hoover Dam south of Vegas, each with a gigantic reservoir backed up ...”

“... is now a scheduled ancient monument tucked away in flat farmland, its whereabouts indicated by a brown road sign pointing across a field of beet (or so it was last autumn). The aqueduct is a fairly short affair; it carried the canal across a narrow, shallow river valley, and replaced an earlier one, still unfinished when it was swept away by a violent flood ...”

“... at all. And today, 15 June, comes George Bush paying a courtesy call on the Queen and Gordon Brown before having a cheering conscience-free get-together with his old mate Tony Blair. And here are the helicopters flying over Regent’s Park to prove it. 26 June, Espiessac. I sit in the wicker rocking-chair in the shade of the willow by the pool. Except ...”