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“... components of Britishness that is the fundamental cause of the monarchy’s current malaise. Stephen Haseler, author of one of the most intelligent of the 1993 vintage of royal books, is absolutely right that ‘the magnitude of the appropriation by the monarchy of the symbols of nationhood and authority is breathtaking.’ Her Majesty’s Government ...”

“... nearly complete as is reasonable to expect – account of the evolution of modern horses from the small lamb-sized Eohippus over the past 55 million years. Evolution can even account for the fact that Eohippus had three toes on its foot, and the modern horse has but one. But for all those 55 million years, the existence of mares and stallions has been a ...”

“... two on the inevitable punishments to come (‘The Reckoning I’ and ‘The Reckoning II’, à la Stephen King) and a final mournful coda, ‘Requiem’ – for unlike redemptionists who denounce sin and threaten hellfire only to preach and promise salvation, Galbraith forecasts an inevitable downfall of relative economic decline, further tormented by ...”

“... a holiday diary kept in childhood, figured in the Tribute to W.H. Auden organised not long ago by Stephen Spender.) In general, the facts in the book are effectively deployed, but they are sometimes insufficient and uncertain. Mr Osborne’s, of course, was not an easy task. Like quite a few artists, Auden lived off rumour, and was the cause of rumour in ...”

“... substitute, an alternative in spirituality. Quite the reverse. Whitman and James, just as much as Stephen Crane and Hemingway, helped the liberation of American literature into physicality, inspired by but growing away from the Emersonian traditions of Puritan New England. Poe, whom Whitman met when they were fellow editors of ...”

“... of wire, jewellery and false hair). Thanks to a lawsuit brought in 1612 by their son-in-law, Stephen Belott, over the non-payment of the dowry allegedly promised with their daughter, Mary, in 1604, we know a good deal more about the Mountjoy family’s affairs than we do about those of their lodger, whose bit-part role as a go-between in the marriage ...”

“... a barn owl with a mouse in its beak, caught by Eric Hosking in 1948, a brown rat photographed by Stephen Dalton as it jumped from a bin in 1983. Curiosity about the look of exotic tribes was not limited to pictures from abroad. The four performers of the Abbot’s Bromley Horn Dance, taken by Benjamin Stone in 1899, stare at the camera as grimly as Papuan ...”

“... the room for the last few minutes; now he returns with a bottle of arak, a jug of water and live small glasses. Baby cucumbers are produced, along with a selection of unripe peaches as hard as cricket balls. ‘I disagree with Samir, this is not the time to change the intifada,’ says Bashir, keen to rejoin the discussion. ‘During the Gulf War we ...”

“... more to discover; that our best current theory of its nature may turn out to be wrong, either in small details or large (if, for example, a paradigm shift occurs in the plant sciences, revealing that we have radically misconceived its nature); and even that some aspects of reality (material, psychological, moral) might resist our understanding ...”

“... At the height of Empire, and of the literature of Empire, J.K. Stephen looked forward to a time When there stands a muzzled stripling,     Mute, beside a muzzled bore, When the Rudyards cease from Kipling     And the Haggards Ride no more. The Haggards have ridden rather precariously since the decline of Empire, if at all ...”

“... belied the most beautiful body he had ever seen, a body ‘like Donatello’s David . . . Those small firm breasts, that modelled neck set with such beauty on her shoulders, that magnificent back.’ In another four days the ambivalence had returned. He was afraid that she was in love with him and ‘it’s a waste of time trying to discuss ...”

“... of Collins’s novel is engaging. Bill is a feckless sports hack working on a rinky-dink paper in small-town Middle America. He gets to cover the local baseball team but hard news passes him by: ‘television is where it’s at these days. The written word is dead.’ He loses interest in his job – ‘I was like a goddamn baker selling day-old ...”

“... from ‘the enthusiastic counter-proliferator who currently occupies the White House’ – no small achievement for the country that introduced nuclear weapons to the Middle East. Was the article intended to prod Obama into taking tougher action against Iran before Israel takes matters into its own hands? Many readers thought so, not least because ...”

“... al-Jazeera devoted an hour to discussing the conference. The conclusions of John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt were confirmed. On the eve of Mearsheimer and Walt’s visit to Israel the Israel lobby stood at the centre of political life in the US and the world at large. Why do candidates for the American presidency believe that the support of the Israel lobby ...”

“... representation to be decoded or analysed.Jung’s illustrations appear stiff in comparison to two small pictures by the American artist and fisherman Forrest Bess. Bess used a limited palette, just three or four colours per image, without any of the surface pattern associated with cosmic diagrams and none of the overt symbolism. Instead of a tree, he paints a ...”