“... wide range of questions which occur (or should have occurred) to any intelligent reader. The title may suggest a Qumranic fantastication, or something like Robert Graves’s King Jesus, but Lane Fox’s purpose, though ambitious, is sober enough. He offers an ancient historian’s view of the Bible. This is ‘a book about ...”

“... Secret service memoirs are invariably rubbished. When Robert Anderson’s Lighter Side of My Official Life appeared in 1910 – Anderson had headed a counter-Fenian agency – Winston Churchill lambasted it in the House of Commons for its ‘gross boastfulness’: ‘It is written, if I may say so, in the style of “How Bill Adams Won the Battle of Waterloo” ...”

“... that are more than metaphors, are not likely to go away.Literature is full of examples, which may be especially instructive when they don’t concern literal ghosts. ‘It is impossible to lay the ghost of a fact,’ Marlow says in Lord Jim, a little before Stephen Dedalus starts his discussion in a Dublin library – only four years before, if we think ...”

“... her nature, drew her mouth to the wound in his side and let her drink to her heart’s content. We may or may not, down the generations and across belief systems, consider this behaviour holy, but would anyone deny that it is disgusting? Mind you, relativism dies hard: there are South American peoples who regularly feast on ...”

“... It was reading Robert Lowell that brought me to poetry at the age of 19, in 1976. I had borrowed a friend’s omnibus edition of Life Studies and For the Union Dead, and something in me said: ‘This is it!’ I don’t remember the poem I first had that response to, but most likely it was in Part IV of Life Studies, ‘Dunbarton’ or ‘For Sale’, or perhaps ‘Waking in the Blue ...”

“... to a friend: ‘The lonelier and the more isolated I am, the more I have come to love myths.’ We may puzzle over what Aristotle meant. Did he love folk-tales, religious stories or high-minded allegories? The Greek word mythos means (centrally) ‘story’ but all stories have or acquire meanings, and we tell ourselves stories all the time. A culture is the ...”

“... peace agreement was tabled. And it very nearly succeeded. Everything hinged on a few weeks this May, when the Darfur Peace Agreement was finalised and signed by the Sudan government and one of the rebel factions. Had the leader of the main part of the Sudan Liberation Movement also signed, the current crisis would not have happened. To understand why Darfur ...”

“... Bouchet, came from.He was born Fabian Avenarius Lloyd, in a residential suburb of Lausanne, on 22 May 1887, the second son of a well-to-do Anglo-Irish gentleman, Otho Holland Lloyd, and a former governess, Clara ‘Nellie’ Hutchinson, whose origins are obscure but who was certainly born illegitimate. They were married in 1884, just a month after Otho’s ...”

“... in, and she enters the crypt alone. ‘Three kinds of space dominate all Tarkovsky’s films,’ Robert Bird writes: ‘nature, the home, and the shrine or cathedral.’ The ‘cathedral space is demonstrated most fully at the beginning of Nostalghia . . . in the rigorously geometrical yet disconcertingly elusive space of a columned crypt’. One reason ...”

“... outlay of coupons. A pair of women’s shoes required five coupons – men’s needed seven. This may have been an echo of an old system of pricing shoes: by the size of the foot and the amount of leather. But it may also have given men’s styles more cachet. The Peal brogue is a woman’s version of a man’s shoe, and ...”

“... which faces Europe in the closing years of this century is certainly as great ... as any which one may read about in history.’ The final volumes of Settecento Riformatore deal with this crisis. Enlightened ministers in Spain and Portugal were driven from power by a revival of traditional values. The Netherlands, which had always been an important centre of ...”

“... tackled two generations of remarkable Drysdales and their partners: George, his brother Charles Robert, the latter’s mistress and intellectual colleague Alice Vickery, their son Charles Vickery Drysdale, and his wife Bessie. And when I saw the proofs I realised that she had indeed researched her subject profoundly. Her discoveries about the personal life ...”

“... commissioned his son Allan to investigate the family’s claim to the Scottish estate of General Robert Melvill, a relation of the Earl of Leven and Melville. In 1818 Allan met the Earl, who enlightened him, as Mr Bennet failed to do with Mrs Bennet, as to the nature of an entail, but gave him an ‘engraved Portrait of the first Earl as a sacred ...”

“... John Singer Sargent’s ‘Robert Louis Stevenson and His Wife’ (1885). The first return to Treasure Island was made by Robert Louis Stevenson himself. Fourteen years after the novel was published, Longman’s Magazine published ‘The Persons of the Tale’, in which Captain Smollett and Long John Silver step out of the narrative after the 32nd chapter to have a chat ‘in an open place not far from the story ...”

“... difficulties.) We don’t know which novel Cooper put aside in exasperation in the middle of May 1820, exclaiming ‘I could write you a better book than that myself!’, but by November that year the first of his 32 novels was in print, and he was halfway through his second. By the time he died in 1851, Smith’s taunt had been answered not just by ...”