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“... Cato, Caesar, Brutus, Antony, Cicero. But above all it is the writings of the last of these, Marcus Tullius Cicero, that give vividness and intimacy to our knowledge of those world-reshaping times. Cicero was a ‘new man’ from nowhere, by birth a member of the second class of Rome’s elite, the ‘equestrian order’, although by this time Rome’s ...”

“... the place of traumatic origin overlap only notionally. Those are not the only possible Vietnams: James Carver, the central character of ‘The Americans’, doesn’t want to experience at ground level a country he knew only from forty thousand feet as a bomber pilot. It’s his wife, Michiko, who wants to visit, convinced by Japanese relatives who had ...”

“... 24 February) focuses on one of the best of these, an Antinous bust from Syria dedicated by one Marcus Lucceius Flaccus ‘to Antinous Hērōs’ (‘Antinous the demi-god’) and recently restored. He is accompanied by several other Antinouses, mostly plaster casts, and some commemorative coins. The extreme similarity of these original and copied ...”

“... Eludes Police for Years. American news item. All words in italics are quoted from this. James, the yardman, was working out back,   Maude, the maid, was tossing a salad – what better beginning, if you’re having a crack   at writing a criminal ballad? And I do want to make it plain: Atlanta’s notorious Catwoman had struck again. In a pricey ...”

“... It was ordered by Catherine the Great (Petro primo Catharina secunda). Modelled on the statue of Marcus Aurelius in Rome, it was meant to evoke the wise emperor extending a main protectrice. Joseph de Maistre commented that one doesn’t know whether this hand protects or threatens. The statue celebrated Peter’s building of St Petersburg, that symbol of ...”

“... in his fifties or sixties, another colossal work was taking shape. In the late first century bc, Marcus Agrippa, right-hand man to the emperor Augustus, commissioned an enormous display (whether made by paint or engraving is unclear) of the entire orbis terrarum, the part of the globe then known. This hugely ambitious map, rectangular in shape and perhaps as ...”

“... as an alternative to earlier autonomous individualism, and in a penetrating chapter on Henry James, Max Saunders explores how James’s memoir-writing affected his novel-writing: his recognition that ‘really, universally, relations stop nowhere, and the exquisite problem of the artist is eternally but to draw … the ...”

“... their own country’s outlawing of the trade on 1 January 1808.) Also lost, of late, according to Marcus Rediker, has been the human experience of slavery. Historical debate has focused on the trade’s economic impact, the causes of abolition and the precise numbers transported from Africa. The most widely accepted figure today is that over the course of ...”

“... Jesus, and you get a sense of the devastation that would be wrought on the faithful. Even Marcus Aurelius belongs in this company: he held a degree of political power unusual for a moral philosopher but his apparently private notes to himself, the Meditations, show him to be troubled by the exercise of empire and keen to rid himself of any signs of a ...”

“... in The Reluctant Fundamentalist of a form that’s unpopular in Anglophone writing: what Henry James called ‘the dear, the blessed nouvelle’. But the French term reminds us of the currency the novella has had in Europe, and that Hamid has said he was drawn to the genre by way of Camus’s The Fall. This makes things more complicated, not least because ...”

“... of his life. Jack Yeats had ambitions as a writer, too. He wrote miniature plays, starting with James Flaunty, or the Terror of the Western Seas in 1901. And novels, of which The Amaranthers (1936) is the best. But it is hard to see how Robin Skelton’s claim for JBY as a writer could be sustained. When the whole of his writing becomes available, Skelton ...”

“... christened John and the vast majority of the other men and boys around at the time were Joseph, James, Thomas or William. Around 1850, however, the repertoire of names in regular use began to increase rapidly. As Gothic-looking steeples rose around the country, so medieval-sounding names crowded around the font: Arthur, Walter, Harold and ...”

“... and equal inclusion within imperial frameworks before rejecting them altogether. The Jamaican James Williams, a former slave, used imperial justice against the repressive ‘apprentice’ system that persisted after the abolition of slavery; the Indian liberal Dadabhai Naoroji criticised ‘un-British rule’ in the hope of realising the economic ...”

“... quilt-makers, wallpaper printers – rub up against the territory of mathematicians. In Symmetry, Marcus du Sautoy describes how, dodging among the tourists, he found all of the 17 possible symmetries of the plane on tiled surfaces in the Alhambra. Quite a number of symmetries can be spotted in the quilts in the new V&A exhibition (Quilts 1700-2010, until 4 ...”

“... be so brief. One does feel he might wear more sober togs And do things quietly in aid of dogs. Marcus Aurelius said there’s an age Beyond which we should scorn the public eye, Put down our seals of office, quit the stage, Settle our business and prepare to die. No one denies the emperor was a sage: His precepts, though, we nowadays defy. Old ...”