“... by the Moreel triptych and some thirty more works, was classed along with Van Eyck and Gerard David as the great Flemish primitive. On that occasion his particular Flemish religiosity (again with the less-than-convincing comparison to Fra Angelico) was emphasised. On the one hand, the very model of a Flemish primitive master; on the other, the German ...”

“... Gene Kelly in his tribute to Gene Kelly, Les Demoiselles de Rochefort. If they admired him it means that there is always room for frivolity, and I warm to the idea that the French New Wave (now associated with what is archetypally arty and intense) actually thought the whole thing was a bowl of technicolour cherries. However, two things suggest that the ...”

“... right to feel he is not a victim of anything other than nature. Hiroshima as a focus for thought means the unthinkable could always happen, has already happened. The task for the imagination (for the Japanese writer, as Oë says) is neither to tame nor to submit to the horror, but to bring its combined enormity and historicity to light, to find disaster’s ...”

“... the training colleges, may serve for an example; and finally direct intervention, as symbolised by David Blunkett’s threat (Independent on Sunday, 23 February) to ‘lay down from the centre exactly how reading should be taught’. Hobbes would have known what to call this: it is ‘a perpetual and restless desire of power after power, which ceaseth only in ...”

“... grow faster than they could be paid off. Wilkes regarded the Bill of Rights Society solely as the means to his own personal solvency and political fame, but Horne, who dominated it during Wilkes’s enforced absence, voiced the opinion of those members who wished to make it a radical organisation. A quarrel between the two became inevitable after Wilkes’s ...”

“... he was 45 and she was 25. Cavendish was the daughter of the Duke of Devonshire, a cousin of Lord David Cecil, et cetera, and became a lady-in-waiting to Princess Margaret – the next best thing, perhaps, to Betjeman bagging a royal. His relationship with Cavendish was clearly one of the most important in his life, but the reader is left to infer from ...”

“... Americans seem to relish Presidential biographies. David McCullough’s Truman (1992) was on the bestseller lists for the better part of a year, and his John Adams (2001) is providing an astonishing repeat performance. Robert Caro’s dramatically detailed look at The Years of Lyndon Johnson has been unfolding since 1982, and large chunks of Volume Three have been serialised in the New Yorker ...”

“... way of Brian Greene’s very successful The Elegant Universe, a book which covers some, but by no means all, of the same ground as Smolin. Indeed, the two complement each other nicely, for anyone who wants to understand, in more than a superficial way, what is currently happening to the deep conceptual foundations of physics. At this level of enquiry, physics ...”

“... old as Marcuse’s 1937 essay on ‘The Affirmative Character of Culture’ and as contemporary as David Lloyd and Paul Thomas’s 1998 Culture and the State – that such a culture, when it is officially sponsored by even the most benevolent and enlightened state, may easily serve to maintain a very non-utopian status quo. If there is an embarrassing absence ...”

“... opinions married to a successful businessman. (Florence’s mother has been a friend of Elizabeth David and is a friend of Iris Murdoch.) Both stories are set at a very precise date, with debates about socialism, Britain’s decline as a world power, and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Both works exude a sense, alive in McEwan’s work since The Child ...”

“... a frequently bloody vengeance that will end the cycle but at a heavy cost. As the Freud-inspired David Quint has argued, this is the dilemma that confronts the central character of the Aeneid. The first part of Virgil’s epic portrays a retrogressive Aeneas, whose boat turns about, who seeks to found a simulacrum of Troy and who wishes for the death that ...”

“... arrived in 1778, it was home to some 300,000 people. The archipelago that Darwin visited was by no means virginal, nonetheless. Two hundred of Ecuador’s criminals were held in a penal settlement on Charles Island (modern Floreana); mariners had introduced domestic animals, notably goats, to several islands; and the practice of stocking up with giant ...”

“... nest in the Mojave desert, naturalists found 250 baby tortoise shells. The success of the raven means the failure of other species, also valuable, so the very sight of these creatures, especially in new places – like outside my window – is ominous. Tortoises are sacred to some of the Mojave’s local tribes, while the raven is, in the mythology of the ...”

“... of folly and murder.’ In his celebration of the West, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations (1998), David Landes contemptuously describes 19th-century Latin American states as having ‘republican trappings’ that unsuccessfully disguised the reality of societies dominated by ‘a small group of rascals’ while ‘the masses squatted and scraped.’ Even ...”

“... owed and the need for reparative histories and restorative justice are increasingly, though by no means universally, recognised. In the mid to late 18th century, Francis Williams, a poet, scientist and free African Jamaican who had lived in England in the 1720s, became the subject of intense debate among Enlightenment men, including ...”