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“... Emerson wanted readers to stumble over the Latinism that punctuates this numbed passage. James Marcus tells us that it is a botanical term for the part of a plant that is easily shed as it develops. His zingy, empathetic portrait of Emerson grounds our understanding of his writing – perhaps even his wisdom – in his experience of loss. It ...”

“... Set in Beirut in the early Eighties, Oriana Fallaci’s novel opens at the moment when, on the morning of 23 October 1983, an Islamic Jihad militant drove a truck laden with explosives into the headquarters of the US contingent of the Multinational Force (MNF). A second suicide bomber attacked the French military base at the same time. Altogether more man three hundred servicemen were killed ...”

“... found it difficult, conversely, to remember our first encounter. It is a slight relief to me that James Schuyler, who writes about reading almost as much as he writes about seeing, confesses to a similar sluggishness of feeling: Twenty-some years ago, I read Graham Stuart Thomas’s ‘Colour in the Winter Garden’. I didn’t plant a winter garden, but the ...”

“... This ‘matrilineal, incestuous, adulterous, polygamous, homosexual household’, as Sharon Marcus describes it in Between Women, was not, however, ‘branded as deviant’. Cushman was indeed ‘unimpeachable’. Female marriages like hers, in which couples called each other ‘sposa’, ‘wedded wife’ and ‘hubbie’, and whose members might also ...”

“... received in combat; in Rome, he rose ever higher in reputation and finally entered the service of Marcus Aurelius. He was then nearing fifty and only midway through his remarkably long career, but Mattern can say little about what came next: ‘At this point we lose the narrative thread of Galen’s life,’ she writes. Only one other datable event, a fire in ...”

“... Pegeen having a healthy baby the very month that he opened at the Guthrie Theater in the role of James Tyrone … The stretch of bad luck was over.’ Axler is completely restored to himself and consults a specialist about the potential hazards of conceiving a child at his age. But Pegeen abruptly ends the affair. Axler’s new confidence collapses ...”

“... James​ Allen was working for a London shipwright when he was killed by a falling piece of timber in 1829. He had been married to his wife, Abigail, for more than twenty years. The medical students who performed the autopsy declared Allen’s body anatomically female, but the coroner continued to call the deceased ‘he’ because ‘I considered it impossible for him to be a woman, as he had a wife ...”

“... l’histoire, et l’histoire n’en regorge point’ – the rhythm may actually be stronger in James Brook’s unpretentious translation). Even if the allusion is clear – to Ecclesiastes 1.6-7, ‘All the rivers run into the sea; yet the sea is not full’ – one must be ready to entertain the notion that Debord’s version, at least for our place and ...”

“... life and art for Yale’s ‘Jewish Lives’ series, drawing freely on the literary critic James Breslin’s impressive full-length biography of 1993. Unlike Breslin, she has little curiosity about Rothko’s darker side, preferring to see his life as an ongoing quest, as she puts it in her subtitle, ‘towards the light in the chapel’. She has ...”

“... Artists). As with everything to do with the Cold War, it mutated in the imagination. As Greil Marcus suggests in his short study, the film ‘prefigured the sense that the events that shape our lives take place in a world we cannot see, to which we have no access, that we will never be able to explain. If a dream is a memory of the future, this is the ...”

“... the lovers hang desperately on to their individual identities in the face of mortality. As Leah Marcus argues in The Politics of Mirth, ‘cavalier’ poems like Herrick’s ‘Corinna’s going a maying’ urge the abandonment of a strong sense of identity, in the spirit of the older ritual forms of carnival. In the wake of Bakhtin’s enormously ...”

“... have for centuries turned to the Gallic Wars – The War for Gaul, in this new translation by James O’Donnell – as a leadership manual and strategic primer, as well as a model of Latin prose. It was really only in the mid-20th century that doubts began to creep in: the seeming transparency of the language conceals as much as it discloses, the ...”

“... British readers like myself – the majority, I suspect – for whom Peru is an unknown country. James Michener could brief us in a heavy-handed tutorial prelude on South American politics. But Shakespeare has chosen an artful form of narrative that cannot carry any great burden of exposition. I wish that Collins had appended ‘In Pursuit of Guzman’ to ...”

“... whom heroism was an obsession. He used his own head as a model for Christ, Solomon, Alexander and Marcus Curtius and believed that heroic history painting was the highest form of art. Today his only generally remembered work is a portrait of Wordsworth. In his lifetime Haydon was well-known and not without admirers but he was dogged increasingly by ridicule ...”

“... 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 ...”