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“... Persian Empire (c.550-323 BCE) of Cyrus, Cambyses, Darius I-III, Xerxes I-II, Artaxerxes I-IV and Alexander the Great are not short of good material. On the one hand, there are numerous colourful tales preserved in the narratives of the Jews and the Greeks, offering a worm’s-eye view of the rich, vast Persian imperial carpet, ‘the beautiful figures and ...”

“... why Lord and Lady Wilde paid those school fees. Merlin Holland’s essay on his grandfather in Peter Raby’s Cambridge Companion to Oscar Wilde illuminates these appropriations by charting a series of significant errors through multiple versions of Wilde’s history. Holland takes us back to one of the most familiar scenes from the life of Wilde: the bad ...”

“... and made him welcome. We all do that, all the colony over.’ It is in pursuit of such myths that Peter Carey’s Oscar and Lucinda set out for the promised land; they learn the realities of life in the colony the hard way. Carey set himself against Dickens more explicitly nine years later, in Jack Maggs (1997), an imaginative reworking of Great ...”

“... Saxon historian Widukind inclined him to think that the Saxons were descended from the soldiers of Alexander the Great. Similarly, some Franks fondly imagined that their people had a Trojan origin. Both Dr McKitterick and Mr Leyser endeavour to see past such images, delusions and sheer propaganda in order to reveal a truer picture of barbarian Europe. For Dr ...”

“... in 63 BCE, his luck ran out. Age had taken its toll. Nearly 70 years old, no longer the young Alexander of his coins and his portraits, Mithridates had long since lost his aura of invincibility. Stranded in the Crimea, the farthest corner of an empire that had once stretched from the Caucasus to mainland Greece, he was powerless: his treasuries were ...”

“... Conference. Major remains insistent that Back to Basics did not amount to a moral crusade. It was Peter Lilley and John Redwood, his hard-right opponents in the Conservative Party, who revisited the issues of single mothers and sexual continence. Nevertheless, Major admits in his autobiography that Back to Basics was devised as a challenge to entrenched ...”

“... film Germany in Autumn was made, with contributions from, among others, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Alexander Kluge, Edgar Reitz and Volker Schlondorff, working together with Heinrich Böll. The Schlondorff-Böll episode showed a panel of TV programmers rejecting a production of Sophocles’ Antigone because it showed Antigone’s suicide after Creon refused to ...”

“... in the immediate postwar period. Most of the book is given over to the adventures of his son, Peter, who goes to Palestine in a refugee ship and is credibly involved there, as spectator and participant, in many of the significant doings of the next couple of years. A third, and much shorter, section of the novel is concerned with the fate of Lasson’s ...”

“... diary is, even in the context of these extraordinary documents, unique and at times shocking. Alexander Afinogenov was one of the most successful Soviet playwrights of the 1920s and 1930s. The borders between fiction and fact are blurred in his diary, which sometimes seems to function as a notebook for his future plays, and which covers, in fragments, the ...”

“... presumably referring to her heroin addiction. Friends and mentors over the years – Rhys Davies. Peter Owen, Brian Aldiss – have made considerable efforts to dispel such feelings of uncase by stressing how smart and cheerful she, was how little her drug addiction appeared to affect her. Such loyal friends did not wish her to be regarded as a pathological ...”

“... going to happen at all, it was most likely during the futurist frenzy of the early 20th century. Peter Vergo, in The Music of Painting, examines a neglected aspect of the modernist era, when a variety of painters, poets, composers and inventors became preoccupied with the convergence of visual and aural stimuli – a utopian race towards a future of total ...”

“... joyless austerity or as the embodiment of fair-dealing and social equity. On these grounds alone Peter Clarke’s biography is welcome. His is not the first biography of Cripps. Patricia Strauss wrote one in 1942; but it just missed its moment, being published soon after Cripps was ejected from the War Cabinet. Eric Estorick, a strong admirer, wrote two, the ...”

“... women became a primary subject of her art, and she often featured her young sons, Hans and Peter, in her pictures of proletarian families. Searching self-portraits – Kollwitz produced more than a hundred in all media – also punctuate her oeuvre, which is meticulously surveyed in the current retrospective at MoMA (until 20 July). Largely ...”

“... it is nearly as long as the whole of the rest of the book put together. It is not for nothing that Alexander Dru, as far back as 1940, thought this section of the book worthy to be published alone, under the title The Present Age, and it is in this scintillating form that this work of Kierkegaard’s has had its currency for forty years. Here, however, is the ...”

“... glover. Even here in Canterbury there were other young writers growing up: John Lyly, son of Peter Lyly, clerk to the consistorial court; and Stephen Gosson, a joiner’s son. We have here a miniature blueprint for late Elizabethan theatrical tastes: Marlowe the tragedian, whose thunderous poetry packed them in at the public theatres; Lyly the author of ...”