“... reproached him for his youthful adventures on the Catholic right; they understood that in his ‘search for a way out of atheist humanism’ he would ‘turn at first towards my tradition of origin’. When François reads Ten Questions about Islam, he discovers that Rediger has remained faithful to the Nietzschean philosophy of his youth. His arguments in ...”

“... who fabricated for him a crazy family pedigree going back to the Normans. Knight argues that the search for the historical Robin is as quixotic as the search for the historical Jesus. His mythic status does not necessarily mean that there was not a historical Robin Hood, merely that the myth has supplanted whatever traces ...”

“... It is 1912, and Miranda Gay, one of Katherine Anne Porter’s versions of her younger self, is travelling to a family reunion in South Texas, in the country between Austin and San Antonio. She has made a rash early marriage and alienated herself from her family. She talks to an elderly woman cousin on the train, who bursts out: ‘Ah, the family … the whole hideous institution should be wiped from the face of the earth ...”

“... were performing just the same desperate balancing act of titillation-with-respectability in their search for readers and advertisers in 1918 as they are today. ‘All the news that’s fit to print’ was the logo of the New York Times in 1896, and over the decades it applied to British tabloids too. Some of the most appealing material (if not the ...”

“... an effect of social exclusion that was the standard lot of children who are both precocious and gay everywhere in America until recently, and probably still is outside certain major cities. Miles’s account of Burroughs’s childhood and adolescence is the last word we’ll need about this period. What’s most striking are descriptions of people and ...”

“... murder of a head of state (even of a dead former head of state) on a book cover was too shocking. Gay novels are off limits.Then there is the case of Salman Rushdie. The scholar Liu Kaifang translated Midnight’s Children in 2002, but his publisher promptly got cold feet and the book was pulled. In 2015, another house bought the rights and published the ...”

“... interests, much enlightenment on the Shylock question, or, by implication, on any other. In search of such enlightenment Gross trawls exhaustively through the text of the play, through its history on the stage and through its critical fortunes. The title page of the first edition mentions ‘the extreme cruelty of Shylock the Jew towards the said ...”

“... an influential book, Roger Chartier went so far as to urge historians to abandon the traditional search for the causes of the Revolution, and to consider Michel Foucault’s ‘systematic deployment of the notion of discontinuity’. The philosophy of history has certainly changed since the days of R.G. Collingwood, to whom the comparison between historians ...”

“... of what is to come. Hatfield is shown walking across the sands of Morecambe Bay at low tide, in search of solitude in which to rehearse the false identity he is about to assume as a Lakeland tourist. So solitary is his walk on the sands that he manages, in the course of the day, to seduce one willing farm-girl and to earn the lifelong devotion of a female ...”

“... by the US Supreme Court in Romer v. Evans – which prevented its municipalities from enacting gay rights ordinances. Homosexuality, according to Mansfield, was ultimately subversive of ‘civilisation’ itself. He caused further outrage with his assault on gender-neutral society in his book Manliness (2006). The offence derived not only from his attempts ...”

“... feed it to Oscar de la Renta’s dogs. Here’s Matthew Tinkcom. ‘Camp is the alibi for gay-inflected labour to be caught in the chain of value-coding within capitalist political economies... I would suggest that Camp is more productively seen in relation to what it says about bourgeois representation (and its tendency to exclude gays) than in ...”

“... The State to Come,* Hutton identifies the tendency for obligations to be urged on the poor (to search for work, to save for a pension) while rights (to enjoy low marginal tax rates, to opt into private education) are defended for the well-off. ‘Labour’s flirtation with a partial implementation of the rights and obligations framework, hitting the poor ...”

“... tension, between the observing author and the active administrator, informs his account of the search for order in post-Saddam Iraq, and makes for an eye-opening and at times enthralling book. Stewart’s stint in neo-imperial government begins with all the makings of a spoof by Evelyn Waugh. Stewart spent January 2002 tramping across ravaged Afghanistan ...”

“... life. Wilde took Gide to a café in a remote part of the city, Douglas having gone to Biskra in search of a boy called Ali. As tea was being prepared for them, Gide noticed ‘a marvellous youth’ at the half-opened door. ‘He remained there quite a while, one raised elbow propped up against the door-jamb, outlined against the blackness of the ...”

“... Trump, Donald’s father, was a king of Queens; the Donald became a joker in Manhattan. In search of fame and greater fortune in the big city, he set out from the family mansion with its 23 rooms, nine bathrooms and, at the front, four white columns adorned with a confected family crest. A Cadillac and a Rolls-Royce were parked in the driveway, guarded ...”