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“... French aristos to view the scenes of combat in a barely disguised example of early war tourism.Marcus Bull reminds us in this latest, no less enthralling retelling how often sieges, from Troy and Jericho onwards, have taken on a mythic quality. They are usually told from the point of view of the besieged and are invariably close-run things in which ...”

“... The Short Oxford History of France volumes on the central and later Middle Ages, edited by Marcus Bull and David Potter respectively, also highlight the formation of a ‘French sense of identity’. Although the role of the king in consolidating power and extending territory is emphasised in all of these books, it is seen as only one aspect of ...”

“... to the kind of computation performed by artificial neural networks. The cognitive scientist Gary Marcus is among the most prominent critics of machine learning as an approach to AI. Rebooting AI, written with Ernest Davis, is a rallying cry to those who still believe in the old religion.Marcus and Davis maintain ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... in Britain, the first named woman and the first self-proclaimed Londoner. The face belonged to Marcus Favonius Facilis, a centurion of the XXth Legion, and was carved, along with an inscription, on the elaborate statue that once sheltered his ashes. The statue was found in Colchester. De la Bédoyère’s book contains 32 coloured plates, but he has chosen ...”

“... 18th, is but another stage in the progress of mankind towards perfection? Or should we think, with Marcus Aurelius, that ‘the man of forty years, if he have a grain of sense, in view of this sameness has seen all that has been and all that shall be’? Gray would opt for the second alternative, but the way the question is posed suggests one reason why it ...”

“... there is little imperial competition: a brief and boastful account of My Achievements by Augustus, Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations (ponderous pensées on human frailty by an apologetic autocrat) and some embarrassingly poor poetry by Hadrian. Julian is represented by a dozen lengthy treatises or orations and more than seventy letters, which hold out – and ...”

“... the medical entries is worth singling out as an example in clarification. The physician Sir Graham Bull, we learn, saved ‘countless lives’ by preventing over-enthusiastic attempts to flush out the kidneys. He argued from the simple analogy of a blocked lavatory: ‘One’s natural reaction was to pull the chain so that more water flowed into the ...”

“... to Aristotle, that a clouded brow ‘signifies self-will (audacia) as in the lion and the bull’, and then hints that this may be why Michelangelo portrayed David frowning. But surely an explanation would only be needed if David, who is waiting for the big kill, was not frowning. Summers also wants to believe that someone introduced the young ...”

“... Native American names such as Tashunka Witko (‘Crazy Horse’), Tatanka Iyotake (‘Sitting Bull’), Woqini (‘Hook Nose’) and Tashunka Kokipapi (‘Young Man Afraid of His Horses’), and even those of the ancient Maya (King ‘Jaguar Paw II’, ‘Smoking Frog’, now renamed ‘Fire Is Born’), so we could refer to famous Greeks as ‘He Who ...”

“... blues singer gazing up at the lights of Times Square is not only banal, it is bizarre,’ Greil Marcus wrote in 1975. Gradually, the image morphed into something more modern: ‘Robert Johnson may be the first ever rock star,’ the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame said when it inducted him in 1986, the year it opened. Wald was especially good at articulating ...”