“... 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 ...”

“... monarchical society into a democratic one unlike any that had ever existed’, though even this may underestimate its constitutional legacy. The United States resolved ancient political conundrums that still bedevil European and British politics, problems such as federal government, divided sovereignty, democratic rule over an extended territory and the ...”

“... attempt to conquer the world, using ‘crowd-psychology’. Thirdly, it is uncompleted, though it may not seem incomplete. Broch worked on it for almost twenty years, while completing other work. More than one version of The Spell has been published. One of them is called The Tempter. The tale is told by a country doctor in the Austrian Alps: his practice ...”

“... precise cause was the Marquess’s suspicion that his son had been Rosebery’s lover. The suicide may have been occasioned by fear of blackmail, or possibly by a desire to save Rosebery from a politically ruinous scandal. His tenure as prime minister was brief and insecure, and though it did occur to him to come to Wilde’s assistance at the time of the ...”

“... attempts to celebrate his subject we see the man’s reputation sink wanly over the horizon. He may have initiated some fruitful lines of enquiry, later developed by others, but he himself seems to have been unable to pursue these lines with any surefootedness or perspicacity. You begin to understand why he wrote so little. Funny things, reputations. Steer ...”

“... have remembered her own dictum that ‘the historian is concerned with the sober reality.’ It may not be true, and there is much to be said for the imaginative speculation, but facts on their own would be better than stereotypes. And there are plenty of sober facts to be collected in this area which can stir the dullest spirit. I have to confess that ...”

“... that Freud’s rooting of adult proclivities of various kinds in the vicissitudes of infancy may also be just ‘good similes’. What in Freud’s etiological speculations might have moved Wittgenstein to this view? He may have felt it was justified because when Freud invoked certain infantile activities as ...”

“... official line in Havana is that when the incumbent’s current five-year term is up, in 1998, he may pass his official duties on to younger successors. He would then have ruled Cuba for forty years, retiring at the age of 71. (Joaquín Balaguer, in the adjoining Dominican Republic, though blind, was last year re-elected President for the sixth time, at the ...”

“... so again in the 19th century, but the practice was unusual in the 17th and 18th centuries. This may seem surprising, because it is striking how well paintings of this period look in frames made at the same date. Meticulous depictions of flowers or sober Dutch wives in crisp white ruffs arc happiest bound by hard sharp dark mouldings with a taut skin of ...”

“... spending, or rather, not taxing and not spending). Wright’s message is a very simple one. This may be the fifth consecutive general election for ‘the New Conservatism of a Thatcherised party’, but ‘it is the first election in which New Labour is the alternative.’ This remaking of the party system is clearly the result of two strong personal ...”