“... that Princess Gloria von Thurn und Taxis, who had objected to Pope Francis and wants a return to a more traditional Catholicism, has much time for him either. And Brian Burch, Trump’s nominee as ambassador to the Vatican, can’t be happy. These last two, according to the New York Times, went to a ball in Rome ahead of the conclave with various right-wing ...”

“... Ballard from having to invent his climatic catastrophe and gives his 1987 apocalyptic fable a more ominous edge of realism. In the ‘dead heart of the African continent’ somewhere between Chad, the Sudan and the Central African Republic, Dr Mallory works for the WHO in an apparently futile search for water on the dried-up bed of Lake Kotto, a task in ...”

“... at right angles to the trunk’. These are the words of the police doctor summoned to the scene, Thomas Bond. It was the morning of Friday, 9 November 1888, and Kelly had just become – at a conservative estimate – the fifth and final victim of the serial killer known as Jack the Ripper. The positioning of the victim’s body is consistent with the other ...”

“... dilemma; if not, not. In any case, can the writ of ‘disease’ run beyond the organic? Thomas Szasz in particular has long contended that the very term ‘mental disease’ is a misnomer, fiction or, worse still, a fraud. In 1973, following a postal vote, the American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from its roster of mental ...”

“... whose works are also advertised on the dust-jacket. ‘Nochlin was taller than I expected and more girlish. Also less pretty. I assumed that if she was a woman and well-known, she couldn’t be “girlish”; who would take her seriously? ... Nochlin is a mischievous and sexy woman: that’s what the gossip in graduate school omitted.’ Lipton is sexy ...”

“... of the architecture. In the case of the Wellcome building a sculpture was commissioned from the Thomas Heatherwick Studio and it bears an analogously close relationship to the style of the building. Both building and sculpture are technically accomplished, coolly anonymous and assured. The sculpture consists of almost 27,000 fine, closely spaced wires ...”

“... smile of a tolerant agnostic: his light, amused impressions illustrate the way England has become more secular than other nations, during this century. Though he claims to have an unreliable memory, he can remember being a beautiful baby of two, in 1912, and screaming at a parson who approached his pram, saying: ‘Hello, my little man.’ He can remember ...”

“... In August 1867, Thomas Carlyle published one of his most virulent diatribes against ‘swarmery’, by which he meant the trend towards democracy. The immediate inspiration for ‘Shooting Niagara: and After?’ was the threat of Disraeli’s Reform Act, which would double the number of adult males entitled to vote, and thus, as Carlyle saw it, unleash untold ‘new supplies of blockheadism, gullibility, bribability, [and] amenability to beer and balderdash’: look at America, the beleaguered Sage of Chelsea argued, and its absurd Civil War, prompted by what he derisively called ‘the Nigger Question’: Essentially the Nigger Question was one of the smallest; and in itself did not much concern mankind in the present time of struggles and hurries ...”

“... piece of nationalist pictorialism, a painterly subject printed in rich greys and blacks from more than one negative – the sky is borrowed. Such prints come fully into their own only when seen in the flesh. But Balogh had also been a war photographer, and the hanged civilian photographed in Budapest in 1919 is journalism, not art – until transformed ...”

“... can’t afford such a system any longer because we wish to make a good education available to many more people – if that is our real reason and our real intention – then we have to think of proper new ways of funding it. But we can also remember the values of such a system, whatever the costs. My parents had to be persuaded to let me stay at school after I ...”

“... curtain on his early years in a number of interviews and in a memoir entitled Gelebtes Denken.2 More recently, Lee Congdon’s The Young Lukacs has emphasised the decisive influence of three early love relationships on the writer’s intellectual development.3 These accounts seek to identify strands of continuity leading up to the political ...”

“... against revolt. Today the Third World is asking whether imperialism, British in particular, did more to pull it forward or to push it back. At any rate, the beginnings of empire were everywhere violent and brutish, from the moment when Spain’s conquest of Mexico ‘gave Europeans a new and potent myth’, the conviction of one European as equal to twenty ...”

“... obligation. Hence the significance of her visits to pleasure gardens. Even if she preferred the more sober and expensive Ranelagh to the hotter atmosphere of Vauxhall, this earnest Christian lady took in both resorts. Places that had once been only for those of easy virtue were, from the 1740s or 1750s, on the itinerary of respectable gentlemen and ...”

“... by Cunard in June 1906 to wrest transatlantic traffic back from the Germans, had completed more than a hundred Atlantic crossings. It left New York for the last time on 1 May, the day the German Embassy printed a warning in the New York Times that travellers sailing on British ships in the war zone around the British Isles did so ‘at their own ...”

“... with other exes waiting in the wings to take their whacks). The irony is that publishers seem more eager to bring out books about golden-oldie authors than books by them, gossip about literary life being thought more marketable than the original horsehide. (Lack of publishing enthusiasm piqued Bellow to bring out some ...”