“... in Woodward’s work. ‘A Sailor’s Thoughts on Dry Land’ is a characteristic example:   he held Daisy’s Rancid hand, that he would soon Eat, but saw her instead As a tower higher Than Sears, in whose crimson Elevators he travelled ... The crimson elevators indicate a strong sub-Freudian strain in the book, reminiscent of surrealism (there are lots ...”

“... now meant enjoying a practised familiarity with expensive rare books and manuscripts. Despite David Garrick’s bequest of his impressive collection of Renaissance playbooks to the new British Museum in 1779, this effectively meant that to be a legitimate Shakespearean critic now required the independent means to own a substantial private library – such ...”

“... saw a poster facing me. Executed in yellow and black, it was a combined logo featuring the Star of David, the Islamic star and crescent, the Roman Catholic cross and the more elaborate cruciform of the Serbian and Bosnian Orthodox. Gens una summus,read the superscription. ‘We are one people’. Here, rendered in iconographic terms, was the defiant remnant of ...”

“... of a man facing a huge breathtaking vista of mountains, mist and sun, a version of Caspar David Friedrich’s Traveller above the Sea of Clouds. A closer look tells us that this man is engaged in painting the railing in front of him, and just now standing back to survey his handiwork. In several different countries, Cartier-Bresson will show two or ...”

“... much time in the city of Cluj, where she had formed a passionate friendship with the historian David Prodan. The Securitate meanwhile had decided that with a name like Verdery she must be an ethnic Hungarian (quite wrong: the family roots were French), and therefore had been planted to encourage subversion among the disaffected Magyar minority in ...”

“... neck’ (Roger Shattuck); ‘Sun neck cut’ (Beverley Bie Brahic); ‘Let the sun beheaded be’ (David Lehman); ‘Sun sundered head’ (Martin Sorrell); ‘Sun throat cut’ (Ron Padgett). The compression of this lurid image of the dawn must have greatly appealed to Beckett; indeed his streamlined version possibly takes its cue from the phrase, for it ...”

“... may be because the theory is non-specific, so that no individual physicians or institutions can be held responsible. And there is an unspoken subtext: that the physicians in question were probably not Western ones. However, the reuse of unsterilised needles did not happen only in the Belgian Congo, so this theory doesn’t explain the strong correlation ...”

“... for all their showing off, Summers and Lindley did beat the rest of the BBC into Egyptian-held territory in 1973. It could be brave and revelatory: a report from Vietnam in 1966 so enraged the American press with its footage of civilian casualties and unhappy American conscripts that the Washington Post implied its reporter should be censored. Or it ...”

“... let alone conspiratorial, opposition to his proceedings. Sir Thomas More died for a devoutly held principle, for which he had to die, not as a conspirator. The Observant Franciscans and Carthusians who were bloody victims of the Henrician Reformation (Elton wrote of monks who were ‘foolish enough to get themselves hanged’) were not involved in ...”

“... him; one of them, Zeus, is saved by a trick and gives him an emetic; he vomits them up and is then held captive in Tartarus. The nastiness of the two stories is the same.) The Jakob Freud who emerges from The Interpretation of Dreams is unrelievedly abject. The most famous instance is not a dream but a memory: the insistent, resonant story of humiliation that ...”

“... which looks back to that earlier episode in historiography, since it derives from a colloquium held in 1996 to explore the implications of a seminal article published as long ago as 1974 by the French historian Jean Bérenger. Bérenger had argued that it was not a mere coincidence that all-powerful prime ministerial favourites ...”

“... about the ‘true’ writings of Karl Ove Knausgaard, or the huge amount of attention paid to David Shields’s polemic Reality Hunger. Time and again we hear about a new desire for the real, about a realism which is realistic set against an avant-garde which isn’t, and so on. It’s disheartening that such simplistic oppositions are still being put ...”

“... below); the equestrian portrait of Niccolò da Tolentino in the Duomo; and the windswept David, painted on a leather shield now in the National Gallery of Art in Washington. In a lost Assumption of the Virgin, it is said, he portrayed himself as Judas. There is no doubting Andrea’s impact among his contemporaries: a challenging figure with a ...”

“... narrow: was Hillary: The Movie actually a movie? But the court didn’t rule narrowly. Instead, it held that it was unconstitutional for the FEC to prevent Citizens United – or indeed almost any association – from spending its own money (as much as it wanted) on political campaigning (whenever it liked). After all, what is a political campaign but an ...”

“... drink at the weekends only – standard alcoholic strategy – and during an engagement party we held for some friends from her law school I drank several bottles of an excellent Ribera del Duero (the party was Spanish-themed) I had found at a good case-price. I remember eyeing my wife as she sat on our couch next to a handsome young attorney. She was ...”