“... suspected ‘post-mortem room and anatomy room porters’ and speculated that ‘imitative action may have come into play.’ He suggested the killings were acts of emulation, committed by more than one maniac, possibly including someone bent on ‘world regeneration’. Whatever the truth of this, the phrase ‘Jack the Ripper’ represented a gothic state ...”

“... believe he can escape hell, but he is cheerfully unrepentant, and he likes the idea that the place may be a fable, as Marlowe’s Faustus (erroneously) thought. Frank shrewdly remarks on the ‘strange velleities that suggest some concealed modicum of inner life’ in Fyodor Pavlovich, but the chances are that he has no inner life to speak of, only a kind of ...”

“... had a female director. It never happened at the time, and with the qualified exception of Elaine May it never happened at all until the advent of Nora Ephron, several decades in the future. The fast-talking dames were chosen for the part by men. Among the major film properties as the war approached, only The Philadelphia Story had a female participant in its ...”

“... is that what determines the meaning of such sentences is what routinely makes them true. One may feel a twinge of nostalgia for ‘paradigm case arguments’ and other such follies of one’s youth. I don’t think this kind of argument works very well either. Sceptics are worried that maybe there’s nothing out there. So, if refuting sceptics is the ...”

“... it up, even in the North-West. And while Lennon had his self-indulgent and self-pitying side, and may well have said, ‘I like to write about me’ (as opposed to the outgoing McCartney), we are after all talking about the man who wrote ‘Revolution’, ‘Give Peace a Chance’ and ‘Imagine’. If his desire to steer an even course between contradictory ...”

“... a natural home in Britain’, yet ends it with a warning that ‘the carnage of Baghdad may well erupt in Bradford and Birmingham.’ One of the few places where Husain felt comfortable in Saudi Arabia (or anywhere else) was close to the mausoleum of the Prophet Muhammad in Medina, where he smelled musk rose drifting from the alleys. Yet he lives in ...”

“... on. As I was beginning this review, I saw a story on the front page of the Daily Telegraph (25 May) headlined ‘Prince in the Tower “died a bricklayer”.’ The report, later taken up by other papers, was based on a book by David Baldwin, who asserts that the elder prince, the deposed Edward V, died of natural causes and that, after Richard III was ...”

“... of Obiang’s opponents, who claim that torture is frequently used in Equatorial Guinea. Oil may be wrecking lives in Africa, but according to Shaxson it is equally damaging – possibly more so – to Western countries, leading, as he puts it, to ‘nothing less than the subversion of French democracy’. To make his point Shaxson takes us into a ...”

“... appetites, her secret certainly won’t be her nakedness). Kellas doesn’t twig, but the reader may remember Actaeon’s fate, transformed by Artemis into a stag and torn to pieces by his own hounds, thereby becoming an early victim of, as it were, friendly fire. It’s not quite The Hunt for Red October, but the quest for Astrid/Artemis in a warring world ...”

“... the inappropriate alchemical term – by modestly noting: ‘The English equivalent offered here may sound like a turn of phrase one might encounter in the poetry of Wallace Stevens, but it offers a good semantic match for the Hebrew.’ (The Hebrew had merely put together two words that both mean ‘honey’.) St Hilary said that the Book of Psalms is a ...”

“... in the foreseeable future, by conquest or diplomacy, have shrunk to zero. The South Ossetians may well end up joining their North Ossetian compatriots in the Russian Federation. That seems to be what most of them – having hounded out their Georgian minority – would prefer. But Abkhazia is a different matter altogether. If the outside world were to ...”

“... in the common language, as when we attribute moral qualities to non-human things; so a tree may be ‘majestic’ or fields ‘joyful’. Partly because of this, associating the beautiful with the good can take place ‘without too violent a leap’. Because it is easy enough to think we can make the leap, there is a risk that we will confuse the proper ...”

“... truth of Johnson’s remark that ‘a woman has such power between the ages of 20 and 45 that she may tie a man to a post and whip him if she will.’ McIntyre handles with his usual tact the question of Johnson’s masochism (on which, to borrow Boswell’s verdict on the aristocratic pretensions of Johnson’s friend Richard Savage, ‘the world must ...”

“... would be inserted ‘to link the work with the current situation’. The slogans may seem quite anodyne now but it is hard to imagine the Prom audience being confronted with banners declaring (for example) that ‘a revolution is not a dinner party; it is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another.’ Glock ...”

“... the afterlife he reproaches the pope for not being proactive enough in the ‘Terra Santa’. It may seem odd that a long discourse on Florence should occupy the middle regions of heaven, but Dante’s bitter relation to his lost city wasn’t to be erased by a visit to the civitas dei. The poem is far from being all sweetness and light: after St Peter ...”