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“... of the young wife whose husband is thinking of the price of the cloth a pedlar is showing her. Nicholas Tromans, in his catalogue essay, writes: ‘Wilkie’s contemporaries valued his early work as dearly as any British art has ever been cherished, but it remains for us to recognise and appreciate what he went on to achieve.’* We can try, but it can be ...”

“... the uncannily sure-footed and the hysterically overblown. Is early, nature-fixated Hughes best, red in tooth and claw, or the minatory spinner of parables in Crow of 1970, or should the palm go to the bestselling Birthday Letters, in which Hughes told his side of ‘the most tragic literary love story of our time’, to borrow the headline on the 17 ...”

“... marginalised. A new study was needed, consolidating and reviewing the evidence, and this is what Nicholas Roe offers. He claims no startling discoveries, but he brings together in one place much scattered information and a few new details from Godwin’s papers. His treatment of the tradition of Dissent in Cambridge fills out what Schneider, Chard and others ...”

“... to explain the exceptional achievements of French woodcarving in this period – achievements best exemplified by the luxury picture-frame. Two qualities are especially remarkable in such work: refinements of texture and sheen (and addition of fine sand to some surfaces, the scratching of hatched and cross-hatched patterns into the gesso covering the ...”

“... in guarding our liberty against it. Yet if a society is corrupted, a powerful ruler may be the best, or even the only, instrument of its reform. Weak monarchy, which becomes the prey of faction or oligarchy, may be a larger threat to liberty than strong monarchy, just as it may be a graver impediment to a policy abroad that preserves freedom (or ...”

“... sky to fall. The markets were re-opening after the weekend when the world first heard the name of Nicholas Leeson, the man who broke the bank in Singapore. It’s hard to remember how that dawn felt – now that we have reassured ourselves at the building society, peeped with relief beneath the mattress, patted the nest-egg – but the mood then was that the ...”

“... points out, Martin Luther’s objections to gifts being given to children in the name of Saint Nicholas prompted him to introduce Christkindlein – ‘the little Christ child’, a messenger of Christ – as the gift-bringer. (Belk doesn’t point out the historical irony whereby mispronunciation transformed Luther’s spiritual pinch-hitter into Kris ...”

“... his portrayal of the ‘guilty men’ of British appeasement as honest men doing their unheroic best in an impossible situation, would have been anathema to him. Namier may have helped to erect a fresh 20th-century myth, but in his Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III (1929) and England in the Age of the American Revolution (1930) he ...”

“... Eliza Pinckney averred that she ‘would not cross that frightful ocean’ again ‘for the best fortune in England’. But was this enough to create the peculiar synchronicity of Hampshire/New Hampshire? Probably not. The six authors in Colonial Identity rightly stress the immediate political, religious and economic links between the criollos and the ...”

“... an explosive device, particularly if the cover of the book it ostensibly contains has a savage Nicholas Garland illustration of a wild horseman wielding a bloody scimitar, surrounded by the decapitated victims of his havoc. If the poems of Manila Envelope are explosive, the manifesto makes its plea for them obliquely. Pawky, wry, epigrammatic and ...”

“... our attention but excludes our participation, derives from the private circumstances ...Only the best criticism can speculate with such fruitful and complete conviction. We are in fact required to recognise in Raphael more different kinds of artistic faculty than we have experience of in any other painter. The virtue of the book is to assemble so well the ...”

“... to the Athenian sculptor Phidias, celebrated in his lifetime for the statue of Zeus at Olympia but best known today for his work on the Acropolis.We know that he was born in Athens around 500 BC and was still active in the late 430s. We can’t be sure what he looked like, though there are some possibilities on display: a marble bust, discovered just outside ...”

“... larger and more battle-hardened, and Napoleon was an outstanding military leader. Undoubtedly the best strategy was to retreat indefinitely, avoiding major battles and making use of Russia’s space and (eventually) its severe climate to wear the French down. Yet no one was prepared to state this openly, since the sacrifices entailed by such a policy were ...”

“... of Sir Edmund Backhouse, and concerned with a character no less shadowy and bizarre, the atomist Nicholas Hill. A rogue Catholic and a disciple of Giordano Bruno, Hill seems to have promoted a little-known rebellion on the death of Queen Elizabeth, a doomed and farcical adventure apparently intended to establish, on the unpromising soil of Lundy Island, a ...”

“... patching it together as he goes along and unable to make up his mind. (Nabokov’s version, the best-known older translation, is a bit more demure than Randall’s, less savage.) So Pechorin, in this account, is both strongly male and slightly effeminate, bold and weak, fair and dark, finely dressed yet dusty from travel. On the one hand, the narrator is a ...”