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“... related in Genesis 49, of Jacob’s prophecies for Benjamin and his brothers, Reuben, Simeon, Levi, Judah, Zebulun, Issachar, Dan, Gad, Asher, Naphtali and Joseph. Zurbarán portrayed them in an array of fantastical costumes including animal skins, striped dungarees, turbans and brocades. Each son is identified at the bottom corner of a painting by a ...”

“... The only writer I know who makes chemistry intellectually exciting for the lay reader is Primo Levi, but, although he writes wonderfully about learning chemistry and the routine work of industrial analysis, he has no reason to describe the history of chemical innovation. Garfield tries analogies – he drops in a recipe for Nesselrode pudding, for ...”

“... Julius II from Heaven in the Julius Exclusus, which shows us Julius locked out of Heaven by St Peter in person, who refuses to acknowledge such a coarse bully as his successor. The books are worth buying for Dr Michael Heath’s edited translation of this work alone. I suppose Erasmus did write it, though he never acknowledged its paternity. The hardest ...”

“... also the case, I think, that such authors may experience each other as rivals, as threats. Primo Levi points this out in a further posthumous selection of his journalistic writings,* in which his two callings of artist and scientist are once more on display, and which serves as a reminder that journalism does have the power to lift the spirit by telling the ...”

“... Giroux that the feelings in the poems ‘do not represent the feelings of an active homosexual’; Peter Levi that ‘homosexual love was to Elizabethans inevitably chaste.’ Pull the other one, Peter. No one watching Marlowe’s Edward II could have felt for one moment that the relationship between Edward and Gaveston ...”

“... as alien. The literary case Heller-Roazen privileges above all others is Adelbert von Chamisso’s Peter Schlemihl, the plebeian Faust who sold his shadow to the devil for magical gifts quickly squandered and so lost his ‘human belonging’, as Thomas Mann put it. Here the Latin adage nomen omen has an ironic twist, for Chamisso thought Schlemihl meant ...”

“... with machine-gun bullets, rounding up the survivors in camps fenced off with barbed wire.’Primo Levi, who had known the horrors of Auschwitz at the same time as Améry and also felt an emotional affinity to the new Jewish state, quickly organised an open letter of protest and gave an interview in which he said that ‘Israel is rapidly falling into total ...”

“... personal adventures and escapes’ – the very things which, for good or evil, Evelyn Waugh and Peter Fleming and Robert Byron, not to mention Redmond O’Hanlon, assume to be the heart of travel writing. This leads us to the reflection that travel writing, or anyway the best sort, only pretends to be informative. The author, out of self-respect, and by ...”

“... gradually became more formal and more centralised. First the bishops became involved, acting, as Peter Brown puts it in his brilliant study The Cult of the Saints, as ‘spiritual impresarios’. Then it was the turn of the Popes, such as Urban II in the 11th century, Calixtus II in the 12th and Gregory IX in the 13th. As Professor Barlow reminds us in an ...”

“... interpretations of the period by Stephen Greenblatt, Louis Montrose, Steven Mullancy and Peter Stallybrass (among others) and a chapter on Othello. This is less a translation than a new study in its own right. One of the great virtues of Shakespeare’s Festive World is the scrupulous care with which its investigations are conducted. Arming himself ...”

“... personality of the hero in the manner of other series of mystery novels – Sherlock Holmes, Lord Peter Wimsey, Miss Marple, Travis McGee et al. The Francis pattern is more like an obsession: the hero suffers great physical pain and humiliation at the hands of a villain who is often so well liked, powerful and respected that no one but the hero can believe in ...”

“... away towards the Firth of Clyde. And I took the tie off and stuffed it into my back pocket. Peter York’s Eighties happened elsewhere. Little bits of it were no doubt happening in the shopping mall over my head that morning, but most of it was well out of reach, and nothing to do with our world at all. He had a lovely time, he tells us. The Eighties ...”

“... of Kipling). Indeed, the last essay in Bartleby in Manhattan is an attack on an English critic, Peter Conrad, for trying his hand at just this sort of thing. In these American observers and explainers two characteristics recur. The first is a close attention to the significance of detail (‘no ideas but in things’) which is often left to speak for ...”

“... Nazism by reference to the categories of British war mythology. Equally, no one could read Primo Levi’s If not now, when? and be in any doubt as to the extent or actuality of the suffering and barbarism for which Germany in those years was primarily, if not solely, responsible. ‘Try to understand, tell, and try and make others understand.’ Edek’s ...”

“... addresses, with tact and restraint, the sufferings of those in Nazi concentration camps – Primo Levi is crucial here for Flynn. ‘The Butcher’ is a graphic tale of a mother who stabs her baby daughter in obedience, as she believes, to God’s command, His bloody instructions not rescinded at the last moment for her as they were for the patriarch ...”