“... Sanative steams, cordiall odours, a fragrancy on my clothes ; [the year’s first butterfly (4 May)] a nutrimental teeming influence, as frogs=spawn or jelly or sperma ceti; dropping in unseen effluvia, efflorescence & unctuous irrigation, ye Reall muck of the air, Rich magazine of Aerial dispensary, aura vitalis on earth’s longing womb. How ye ...”

“... me like screams to the angelic orders.For isn’t a foreign language the beginning of terror?May I ask the diva, if I briefly have her ear?The boys leaped, and in the maelstrom, towardsthe centre, one surfaced. The cross-bearer.He was borne on shoulders back to the pier,all handsome as cherubs halfway to turning seraphim.The crowd erupted in ...”

“... others. For instance, casual observation suggests that we are in the middle of a baby boom, but it may just be that imagining what it is like to be near term or strapped in a buggy in sticky weather makes me pay more attention to pregnant women and babies. The National Gallery’s picture of the month for July, Rembrandt’s Woman Bathing in a Stream, was ...”

“... was announcing the shortlist for the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction at the time. His verdict may prove to be no less premature than Johnson’s pronouncement on Sterne: ‘Nothing odd will do long. Tristram Shandy did not last.’) Responding to Marr’s comments, Ian Jack, the editor of Granta, suggested that it would be more accurate to say there was a ...”

“... For once one could ask for less space between the pictures (although when the crowds roll in that may seem a foolish wish). Amateur snapshots and old postcards tend to have high skies and extensive foregrounds in order to get everything in – the whole family, the distant mountain chain. Our two eyes set side by side take in a wide view but much information ...”

“... are more honest and more moral, more likely to be good blokes, than journalists are: but this may be because he judges politicians by different standards – he seems to think, for example, that it’s more important for them to be well intentioned than to get things right. Behind these opinions lurks a larger and more troubling notion: that journalists ...”

“... at large, on the all-important subject of respect. ‘My government,’ the queen said on 17 May, ‘is committed to creating safe and secure communities, and fostering a culture of respect.’ But Ali G got there first. In the otherwise execrable movie Ali G Indahouse (2002), which was shown on ITV as part of its general election coverage, the newly ...”

“... Without the support of the Northern Irish Democratic Unionist Party, which won ten seats, Theresa May would have been unable to form a government. Hence the Agreement between the Conservative and Unionist Party and the Democratic Unionist Party on Support for the Government in Parliament. It is undated but is intended to last, subject to possible ...”

“... own right, created over many years to distil and give form to his aesthetic intentions’.† This may seem hyperbolical, for the clutter and mess in the studio are at first sight not so different from a run-down student flat or a long-stay rooming house. But there is a pleasing wilfulness in the refusal of an artist whose first career had been interior ...”

“... wooden planks – the puzzling contribution of the exhibition designer. After a long wait, you may peer through a hole at the two great panels illustrating episodes in the story of Judith and Holofernes, which are painted with the same energy, the same incisive touch seen in the fresco, but on a miniature scale. In one scene the bleeding, nude body of ...”

“... place! That’s the fucking Thames dribbling down your face! But the deaths of others, while they may act as a memento mori and be the occasion for anguished, horrified, or partly erotic contemplation, cannot, however nearly experienced, be the same as one’s own. Death is common to all and unique to each. One can try to imagine one’s demise, but this is a ...”

“... joke continues to run because James is worried about the worldly obscurity his stylistic obscurity may end in, and the comic heightening of their contrasted fortunes flatters even as it caricatures her. They share the joke, but it in no way settles their differences. In 1913, worried at James’s anxieties about money, she tried to get up a $5000 birthday gift ...”

“... as ever fell to the lot of a man of letters’, a life ‘almost strikingly deficient ... in what may be called the dramatic quality’, Herbert constructs an often lurid tale of psychosocial conflict and ‘torment’, a narrative of the domestic affections translated into the idiom of New Historicist gothic. Born Nathaniel Hathorne, the only son of a ...”

“... wanted the colony to become one of flesh-and-blood people rather than simulations. It may well be, however, that humans will take no part in the colonisation, not even in simulated form. By around the year 2030, Tipler estimates, computers will have intelligences equal to ours. Soon afterwards they will overtake us. They themselves could be the ...”

“... particular set of social ordinances sometimes comfortable and sometimes uncomfortable to obey. It may be that what the editors find non-feminine is simply the belief, which Barbauld inspired in others and seems to have shared herself, that she possessed a humane intelligence greater than could be easily accommodated to the requirements of her fate. Men who ...”