“... in Peru. The Mexica, as the Spanish called them, and the Inca, however different still they may have been, were not just simple Caribs. At the same time, a new intellectual force appeared in Spain itself: working at the university in Salamanca, inspired by Francisco de Vitoria, a Dominican who had studied under some of Mair’s pupils in Paris, and ...”

“... the only foreign country in which he urges American industry to invest, and who has (although this may be coincidental) even more Irish-Americans in his Cabinet than had John F. Kennedy. Like Carter, Reagan has been advised to raise the question of Ireland in general, rather than in specific terms: had he succumbed to the temptation to tiptoe into the ...”

“... DNA. The leaves peel off the Advent calendar Uncovering one chocolate every day. The decorators may have gone too far In hanging Santa Claus from his own sleigh. Behold two members of the privileged class – The young, who think that time will never pass. Too soon to tell them, even if I knew, The secret of believing life is good When all that happened ...”

“... he would have had matter for it. However, it’s an ill wind that blows nobody any good, and it may well be that a single volume, closely packed as this one had to be, will serve his own and Cummings’s memory better. The general reader will hardly want two volumes on the whole population of 20th-century poets – nor, when one thinks of Johnson’s ...”

“... it gave a further stimulus to Platonic studies. Philosophical Platonism was distinct from what may be called the natural Platonism of certain imaginative writers, which was not uncommon during the Romantic period. Platonism of a kind pervades Wordsworth’s ‘Immortality’ Ode, and it is present too in much of Shelley’s work. Ruskin read Plato ...”

“... lives so miserable that I remember kneeling by my little bed of a night and saying, “Pray God, I may dream of my mother!” ’ Separation thereafter became Thackeray’s condition of life. His power and his incurable wretchedness are crystallised in the reflection on loneliness from Pendennis which Peters takes as her epigraph: ‘Ah sir – a distinct ...”

“... in the late Forties, which suggests that Fuchs knew her to be mentally unbalanced. Fuchs may have been abnormal in being able to lock his activities into two watertight compartments and to close his mind to the implications of his spying for the colleagues who trusted him and the country that had given him shelter: but no more abnormal than Anthony ...”

“... hall entertainer. Swooping on a vulnerable target, she broke down any Calvinist inhibitions he may have retained, wrecked his marriage (not without assistance from the man himself) and carried him off to Caxton Hall, where she is supposed to have exclaimed afterwards: ‘I’ve done it! I’ve done it!’ Despite being (allegedly) pushed into an Amsterdam ...”

“... that the Hebrew reads adam/l’adam and not, as it actually does, ha’adam/l’adam. All of this may well seem to ‘savour of curiosity’ as the Preface to the Authorised Version puts it, defending itself against the charge that it had not always translated the same Hebrew or Greek word with the same English word. ‘Is the kingdom of God become words and ...”

“... believed that the late work was an inspired adaptation to apparently intolerable conditions: It may be safely said that the curious and unique development of the art of pastel that this obstacle compelled him to evolve would not have come into being but for his affliction. A large scale became a necessity. For the shiny medium of oil paint was substituted ...”

“... for in the family, and which her family so signally fails to develop in her. Be that as it may, she contrives to take an overview of her life across the years without losing a sense of the oddness, partiality and contingency of its shape. One striking example of this is her account of the (de) forming of her sexual life because of an infantile ...”

“... which also exists in a pastelised version (a drawing Degas made for that monotype in about 1880 may also have served as a point of departure for the figure of the boulangère): the bather monotypes of the late 1870s are themselves closely related to the brothel monotypes of the same period. There is evidence here of a systematic exploration, in various ...”

“... been accused of condoning financial wrong-doing and cronyism in his administration. The LAPD may be incorruptible, but there is no question that some rooms in City Hall can be bought. Taking advantage of the furore provoked by the King tape, Bradley set up a commission into LA policing which drove Gates into resignation, effective July 1992. In his ...”

“... classroom time on Humanities and Social Science subjects. At any time a Caltech undergraduate may be taking up to five courses in widely different subject areas – all designed to make him (or increasingly her) a better all-round scientist. It looks like powerful ammunition for British advocates of modularisation, but there are some caveats. The intimate ...”

“... can come to terms with their pasts, choosing to enshrine some principles and discard others. Some may wish to give this a more empirical and pragmatic cast, but Furet’s political-philosophical account has the great merit of showing that ideas can matter, especially when they engage the attention of political ...”