“... visitation complaints and defamation suits, and the answers have always been ‘it all depends.’ David Cressy’s excellent book suggests a different approach, examining conflicts over ritual and offering stories rather than statistics. Despite Coverdale, Gouge and the Admonition, a wedding was not only a religious ceremony, but the culmination of weeks or ...”

“... with angelic grace and with a formal complexity which is delightfully difficult to disentangle. David Ekserdjian’s book illustrates all of Correggio’s paintings, great and small, superbly well, together with many of his drawings. In the latter we can watch him weaving his compositions with a nervous pen line; giving them more unity, more softness and ...”

“... In September 1992, David Mellor resigned from the government after concern over an extra-marital affair and a free holiday in Europe. An affair also accounted for Mr Tim Yeo in early 1994. Soon after this resignation, Lord Caithness resigned following the suicide of his wife, which apparently was the result of an affair he had been conducting ...”

“... rise of antislavery in Britain and America coincide with an intensification of racial thinking? David Brion Davis’s Inhuman Bondage throws light on the process by which slavery became exclusively black. There were many European precedents for white slavery, not only in the classical period but in the trading networks of the late medieval ...”

“... the focus of their lives and the purpose of their suffering. Driven by this pledge, thousands of young fighters were to die in Jordan in 1970 and in Lebanon between 1975 and 1990. The very existence of the PLO was an assurance to these Palestinians that they were not forgotten, that they would somehow be compensated for their tragedy. In all the fetid camps ...”

“... as a picture ofa normal little boy wearing shorts but was soon reworked into a full-frontal of a young man with a shock of blond hair and an adult’s chest hair, completely naked except for a pair of girlish Mary Janes on his feet. There’s no way that anyone who knew Warhol could have read the painting as anything other than a brazen self-portrait by an ...”

“... biscuits from the same years depict these new products of plenty as both perfect and null, and his young man in a tennis sweater is beautiful and bland in a similar way: the good life of the postwar period as the unexamined life of leisure and sport. Might the doubt raised in such paintings about a reconstructed West Germany extend to its quick embrace of ...”

“... with the classics of the genre, is off. There is another premise, another genre in question. David Selznick told Wilder that ‘mixing gangsters and comedy wouldn’t work,’ and perhaps even Wilder didn’t know at first how wrong his adviser was. Would the St Valentine’s Day Massacre really play as farce? The opening frames of the film offer an ...”

“... Lewis Carroll. (The fact that the latter also represented the indisputable nadir in the career of David Bowie is, for the purposes of this review, neither here nor there.) In the film Dreamchild, the cinematic meditation on the life of the real Alice directed by Gavin Millar and scripted by Dennis Potter, Henson was the obvious choice to supply the puppets ...”

“... not to snub Euro 2012, arguing that engagement, not the cold shoulder, is the route for a troubled young nation (the first children born since Ukraine became independent are not quite 21). Yanukovych may be odious, and Tymoshenko harshly treated, but Ukraine’s geography and history mean the president doesn’t have the control over Ukraine that Lukashenko ...”

“... when a change of surface texture – say, between one fabric and another – must be registered. (David would let this French tradition of brushwork be the vehicle for political rather than religious probity.) This is a very different craft from the more energetic kind which makes surfaces in Rubens’s paintings seem more alive than the hair or fur or flesh ...”

“... only a couple of weeks ago and giving entirely good reasons why Gordon Brown was on top and David Cameron on the ropes now look faintly embarrassing. But at the beginning of October Brown was on top and no one can be faulted for failing to see his impending humiliation. Nor could they have predicted that the abandonment of a premature general election ...”

“... We​ needed a new bathroom, and found some plumbers – interesting, attractive young men with remarkable stories to tell about their lives and travels around the world. The most interesting of them – S.’s sister described him as ‘a hot mess’ – went home after work one evening having forgotten to tighten a nut, which led to a leak and the near collapse of our kitchen ceiling ...”

“... can be exaggerated, faked or feigned,’ the psychologists Peter Halligan, Christopher Bass and David Oakley wrote in their introduction to a collection of essays from 2003 titled Malingering and Illness Deception. Medical professionals, researchers and even courts, they went on, were often reluctant ‘to entertain the label or to stigmatise individuals as ...”

“... there appears a certain natural goodness verging on modesty.’ Three centuries later, in 1956, David Harris Willson’s biography took the hostile line. Scottish historians tended to be fairer, prompting Jenny Wormald to ask in 1983 whether James was ‘two kings or one?’, so different were his historical reputations north and south of the ...”