“... ear it seems to combine the words ‘agony’ and ‘anon’, with a hint of ‘agnostic’. It may also remind us of the Greek words for ‘lamb’, and for ‘holy’ or ‘wise’. The echoes are fortuitous, but they are not unapt. For, as David Aberbach shows, Agnon was preoccupied throughout his writing career with ...”

“... was reticent and barely spoke, but became friends with a fellow student (and fellow photographer), David Armstrong. The camera became a solution to the problems of childhood, of growing up, of what was happening to her now – a way of proving her experiences were real.After leaving Satya, she moved into a flatshare with Armstrong in Boston. Her luminous ...”

“... often sleep on three legs. Jonathan Wordsworth goes on to warn his reader, with a logic that may escape those unfamiliar with recent Romantic criticism, not to ‘overstress the ordinariness of what is happening’. We, like the peasant, would probably see a horse asleep in the moonlight, whereas Wordsworth ‘points out ... something quite different. We ...”

“... David Kohn opens his monumental Darwinian Heritage with a deftly-delivered kick, observing that a study of the wider institutional culture of Darwin’s day seems to be ‘beyond the present ken of historians of 19th-century biology’. It’s a well-aimed blow. Little of the Darwin industry’s capital has been spent on exploring evolution in its social context ...”

“... similar imaginings of nuclear war, and we learn in an aside that the central male character of David Plante’s new novel works on a science project related to Star Wars. A lot of writing in the last few years – The Burning Book, The Golden Gate, Or shall we die, Einstein‘s Monsters – shares in a helpless obsession with the nuclear threat: perhaps ...”

“... their fathers or husbands, painting before an audience was a means of demonstrating autonomy. In May 1664, Cosimo, Grand Prince of Tuscany, joined the visitors who packed into Elisabetta Sirani’s studio in Bologna to watch her paint a breastfeeding scene. Having established the first secular art school for girls after inheriting her father’s ...”

“... injustice to the unprotected.’ The fact that he is not also molested in the introduction may be a gratifying mark of the respect still shown towards the episcopate by Conservatives in Oxford. But both Plant and Sykes seem to have walked unwarily into the common room of All Souls from another sort of conclave or conventicle in which they would have ...”

“... he was writing a history of theory, partly because the painters did not correspond to the theory. David Solkin’s Painting for Money returns the painters to the story. Hogarth is here as well as other anti-civic humanist painters, and there is even a spokesman for the opposition to Shaftesbury, Bernard Mandeville. But Mandeville is presented as an isolated ...”

“... American writer deserving revival, but they take very different approaches to her life and work. David Roberts was mesmerised by this ‘enigmatic, thwarted writer’ and sought to unravel her story with the help of Eve Auchincloss, Stafford’s friend and editor, and her 42-year correspondence with ex-lover and friend Robert Hightower. He paints a ...”

“... over-treatment in the US, while fund-holding and drug budgets are feared here because they may encourage under-treatment). Both parties also believe that the recent NHS reforms are of quite momentous significance. A foreign observer might at first be puzzled, since the reforms appear to consist mostly of accounting changes, and will still leave the UK ...”

“... which appeared under Mr Major’s name in various newspapers during the campaign – which may be why they read better than some examples of the genre. Nevertheless, these sorts of book are in perpetual danger of sliding from hard-nosed reportage into a glutinous ‘lives of the saints’ approach to their subjects and their immediate ...”

“... French’s Bleeding Heart, Malcolm Bradbury’s Stepping Westward and Rates of Exchange, and David Lodge’s Changing Places and Small World. Now, all around the large cabin, other refugees from Roger Moore in For Your Eyes Only and from Gene Wilder in The Woman in Red have their noses stuck into novels. Could it be that a certain kind of novel is being ...”

“... prints interviews with them, as if they were as respectable as the Shah of Iran. Dickson mentions David Bailey, who published a handsome photograph of the Twins, with an eloquent caption by Francis Wyndham, comparing them with Humphrey Bogart. It was the little public-school gang of Private Eye that broke through the hype: larger journals seemed awed by the ...”

“... Union, but her independent – and extreme – militancy caused a breach. In the words of David Mitchell, a biographer of Christabel Pankhurst, she became ‘an incorrigible freelance’. In the summer of 1913, newsreel cameras captured her running across the course of the most popular race of the year, the Epsom Derby, falling under a horse and lying ...”

“... it might be a dictatorship, it was an enlightened and progressive one. As for Egypt, Anthony Eden may have described Nasser as ‘that Hitler on the Nile’, but after the 1978 Camp David Accords the country became a pillar of American interests in the Middle East and – by its withdrawal from the Arab-Israeli conflict ...”