“... clear distinguishing attributes. Professor Cox-Rearick even speculates that the missing Mercury may be subsumed into the fully-clothed figure she identifies as Venus, on the grounds that Mercury, in an astrological context, is sometimes represented as a hermaphrodite, and ‘the unusual view of the goddess from the rear, which recalls the traditional ...”

“... radicalism works well on paintings which we interpret most immediately as rural idylls but which may also be felt to emerge ‘from a world of social and economic relations that are anything but idyllic’. A painting which seems to represent harmony between man and nature, and, more specifically, harmony between a landowner and the workers on that ...”

“... from later historians the descriptions ‘wildly unhistorical’ and ‘wildly unstatistical’, may by 1843 already have begun to draw criticism. Its nine volumes of evidence selected to suit a party line must have taken some digesting even in a period which took Blue Books as literature very seriously indeed. In any case, the New English Poor Law which it ...”

“... for the alliance of born-again social democrats and ancient political re-treads among whom he may be doomed to reside. He deserves better, and so does the book. It is written by a socialist, and for socialists. This is its first fascination. The sage of Morgan Grenfell will wince over its strictures on public expenditure and the role of government ...”

“... is conceivable that something irreversible is taking place. Today’s new wisdom about publishing may become as enduring, familiar and dispiriting as the truism of the decline of British cinema. That decline had much to do with television. Book publishing has seemed, hitherto, robust on this flank. The industry prospered in the 1960s, when television was ...”

“... offered by other scholars. Even if we allow for the restricted use of footnotes, which may not be the author’s fault, this seems to me unfortunate and unwarranted. The prime objects of his contempt are ‘abstruse iconographical interpretations’, and although most art-historians today share – or should share – a certain disquiet about the ...”

“... syntax, what is essentially a pictorial style. But Titian’s Dianas, in conjunction with Ovid, may have offered a challenge to Shakespeare in terms of the goddess’s personality. According to Ovid, poor Callisto was betrayed by the very sexual tastes which Diana, ‘a kind of lesbian gym-teacher’, encouraged in her following, for cunning Jupiter had ...”

“... is having his first one-man show at the Palazzo Grassi in Venice: 15 February until 31 May. This is the book of the exhibition. Modern interest in Arcimboldo dates from his inclusion, by means of enlarged photographs, in the exhibition ‘Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism’, organised by Alfred Barr at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in ...”

“... is designed to speak for one ‘level’ alone. Olmers and the Major, if less obviously than A&O, may represent aspects of Schmidt. The Freudian theory also has implications for the style of the work. Since for most readers of Evening Edged in Gold the author’s style is likely to be overwhelmingly the most potent source of pleasure or of irritation, it ...”

“... marks your position in society, and that saying or doing the Right Thing at the Right Time may keep you in the conversation long enough to be remembered by the Right People. One senses that all these Gilberts want somehow to remain outside of the Inside, free to believe that they can remain superior to those they are seeking to emulate. They are ...”

“... Whether Napoleon when he landed near Antibes on 1 March 1815 indeed looked rompu historians may have determined: but certainly not with the help of Belloc’s mother, an Englishwoman who was born a little more than fourteen years later. In The Cruise of the Nona, however, Belloc declares that ‘time and again’ in childhood he was told the story of ...”

“... that the text he offers is precisely what the author wrote – an author, we must remember, who may have made any number of mistakes in usage, in grammar or in his thinking? The best answer possible is that there is (if there is) a consensus of expert opinion in the textual critic’s favour. It hardly needs saying that such a test does not warrant the ...”

“... straightforwardness or for a disclosure of the whole truth. Stories are narrated by characters who may be cagey, volatile, fanciful, captious, even self-deceiving. In the past, John Fuller has been a cunning contriver of riddles on a small scale, but here the design is grander. The verse is protean and the reader, like Neoptolemos, must grapple with fickle ...”

“... plants to ferns, which is just the sort of thing that happens after a forest fire today. Disaster may even have a pattern, with mass extinctions happening about once every 26 million years. What causes extinction is not clear. There has long been a vague feeling among evolutionists that animals have a sort of planned obsolescence. They simply give up the ...”

“... its scope had to be limited. Surrounded by the barbed wire of polemic, MacDiarmid’s anthology may have seemed an angry piece of book-making. In retrospect what stands out is its inclusiveness. Here (in English translation) are the great Latinist George Buchanan and the Gaelic poet Alexander Mac-Donald. Duncan Ban MacIntyre’s expansive 18th-century ...”