“... light’ also blocks out one’s proper empathy with, and understanding of, the poor. While it may be true that the poor are people like you and me because we were all created by God, it is only through an understanding of a country’s history, and the history of the poor, that we can begin to appreciate that, indeed, the poor were people like you and me ...”

“... leadership was moving away from it. Intense international pressure induced Shamir to come up, in May 1989, with a Palestinian election plan but it was a plan that he knew would be unacceptable to the Palestinians. His aim in framing it was simply to shift the responsibility for the continuing deadlock onto the Palestinians. In any case, this plan was added ...”

“... he fell in love with the stepmother of the friend with whom he had gone off to enlist. Although he may never have known her real age, the already twice married Cissy Pascal was, at 49, 18 years older than Chandler and barely younger than his mother, another fading beauty who never revealed her birth date. Herself a member of the Pascal household, Florence ...”

“... rumours too: for example, that there will be a definitive partition, in which case Gorazde may be abandoned as part of some deal with RS, and a neat redrawing of boundaries. Or they wonder if Gorazde will be the launching point for a new offensive. I feel as isolated from the political mainstream as the rest of the population and no longer in any ...”

“... them by hand, or mail them to interested parties for inspection. James adopted Fletchcrism in May 1904, as he was finishing The Golden Bowl his last major novel. Extolling ‘the divine Fletcher’, and taking an hour over a modest meal, he chewed slowly for almost six years, a period which coincides closely with his rereading and rewriting of his ...”

“... were recorded in private notebooks, but were never for public recommendation. The Moralists may look like a credo, but it conceals what the author most cared about. Here again we might think of Pope’s Essay on Man: an elegantly achieved justification of enlightened theism that gives no hint of its author’s true devotion. In Pope’s case, of ...”

“... have made, in case of sudden occasions, a little reserve (besides the silver now given me) that I may not be obliged to borrow, and look little in the eyes of my fellow-servants.’ In the original she was naively confident that ‘God will not let me want.’ The later Pamela, with her prudent deposit account, reflects rather more abstractly, ‘Providence ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... matter of forgery, are what you make them, ‘things are not what they are.’ Of course Sciascia may also be remembering a famous line from Othello, as Borges does in his little parable about Shakespeare, ‘Everything and Nothing’, reminding us that ‘Iago claims with curious words: “I am not what I am.” ’ This is much spookier than his just not ...”

“... were, after the Revolution, the reigning painterly icons of female devotion to the nation. There may even be a paradoxical value in leaving women out of paintings altogether. Géricault, she points out, scarcely painted women at all. In The Raft of the Medusa, he even omitted the real heroine of the ordeal at sea which inspired the work. When he did turn his ...”

“... Behind me is Gibraltar’) were making him more influential than he had been as a politician. In May 1956, rather startlingly, Wyatt decided to test this proposition. Reporting on elections at the Amalgamated Engineering Union, in which he expected the Communist Party to make gains, he delivered a speech rather than a summary to AEU members and his other ...”

“... politics were more or less quietist. In his letters he sometimes expressed himself in terms which may yet earn him a place in the Modernist sin bin of Professor John Carey (‘I personally have no sympathy with the masses … They are fools … If anything, I hate the masses. I have lived with them, and I have smelled their dirty breaths and bleak minds ...”

“... first book, The Early Italian Poets. Restoring Dante Gabriel’s work to its original pre-eminence may prove a difficult task, despite the aid of a biography written without spite or condescension and this good edition of the writings. But is that restoration desirable? Probably not, at least if we want to recover from Rossetti and his work the values he has ...”

“... its rhythms. At least people knew who they were and had some solid ground to stand on. The winners may have been a little uppity or cruel, but they could not fly too high. There were things that people were ashamed to do, limits that marked out the moral boundaries of their deeds. The permissible (halal) was distinguishable from the impermissible ...”

“... flowers” and went to bed, as he himself declared, “dreaming of Nijinsky”.’ On 29 May 1913 Nijinsky’s ballet Le Sacre du printemps opened at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées. Several bars into the opening movement, people in the audience, who had paid double-price to get in, began to jeer and scream at the tops of their voices. The ...”