“... and his nagging wife – We keep the templates safe in our bank vaults. But as I write this down I may uncover That ring of majesty I know is stored In words, and by retrieving it I may Dredge cool epillia from the image-hoard – Thus while each word remains I will discover The source from which the magic rays are sent And ...”

“... the other west, and the relief prominently features Greeks shaking hands with Persians. Samosata may have been an Aramaic-speaking town, even in Lucian’s time. An antagonist in his dialogue Twice Accused claims that when he began his training he was ‘barbarian in speech, and all but wearing a jacket in the Syrian style’. ‘Barbarian speech’ ...”

“... yet the scope of the project, its distance from anything that might be described as parochial, may persuade them that the records of Christianity, preserved and interpreted for the most part by assiduous priests and scholars, deserve a few moments of their attention. Consider, as one instance among a thousand (I’ll come back to them), the decisions or ...”

“... around 400 ad by holy men, like bishops, then by other categories, including those kings who may or may not have been saintly. Louis IX of France was the first major king to be made a saint. His reign, from 1226 to 1270, forms the middle episode in an unbroken success story for the French monarchy, a story which had ...”

“... these attachments. Though they are intimately involved in the way he values his actual life, he may always wish he had married the other woman, and regret that he didn’t. Yet according to Wallace the affirmation of his actual life spreads backwards to encompass his not having done so, which is its necessary condition. If Wallace is right about this, then ...”

“... a North Korean diplomat at the UN, warned of ‘a dangerous situation in which a thermonuclear war may break out at any moment’. A few days later, President Trump told Reuters that ‘we could end up having a major, major conflict with North Korea.’ American atmospheric scientists have shown that even a relatively contained nuclear war would throw up ...”

“... you. (D&D’s revival piggybacked on the film-based Tolkien revival too, though the Tolkien estate may not have loved it: the first D&D sets had characters called hobbits, but the makers changed the name to ‘halflings’ after a trademark challenge.) The first role-playing games (RPGs) and the first popular video games appeared at nearly the same ...”

“... some years ago; the bitter taste still lingers on, and I have a grudging sense that Jane Fairfax may not be quite as thin a dish of gruel as that. Instead it has an unappealing, mixed-up wrongness of flavour. It wants to be both like Jane Austen (to substitute for the real thing) and to revise Jane Austen (to be a real thing itself). Aiken disastrously fails ...”

“... is better entitled than most powerful people to a contented old age. The sadness of that portrait may after all be no deeper than it is proper for any sensitive person of 80 to feel as he surveys what seems to have been an unprecedentedly greedy and uncivilised community. This interesting autobiography is in the end, like most autobiographies, an unsatisfying ...”

“... including the ‘fear’, as Tom Wilkie writes in Perilous Knowledge, ‘that the project may open the door to a world peopled by Frankenstein’s monsters and disfigured by a new eugenics.’ Wilkie, a physicist turned science journalist, provides a lucid, serviceable primer on the technical developments that have made the Human Genome Project ...”

“... adult population of France who, last spring, voted twice to elect a President (on 24 April and 8 May) and twice to elect a Parliament (on 5 and 12 June). In September they voted in local elections, and in November the referendum on the future of New Caledonia took place. Many of them are now thinking about how they will vote in next year’s municipal and ...”

“... route from Oxford to Rome, he dismisses private judgment with a humorous metaphor. Catholics, too, may use it, but ‘they use it ultimately to supersede it; as a man out of doors uses a lamp in a dark night, and puts it out when he gets home. What would be thought of his bringing it into his drawing room?’ Yet he was aware of an anxiety that his own habit ...”

“... be honest, without pretensions; the poetic problem, or part of it, that to strip away all colour may leave only a faint wash. Because the language is so neutral, it is the form in these lines which eye and ear find themselves debating. A slight awkwardness can add charm and authenticity: but when I come to the tenth line, which has the right number of ...”

“... This is a political claim which many people will reject from the outset, and those dissenters may use the violence of the last twenty years as evidence that none of the available meta-narratives – nationalism, anti-nationalism, imperialism, unionism, socialism, feminism – are sufficiently hospitable to differences. There is a series of questions to be ...”

“... of Shakespeare? Either as a substitute for or as a supplement to a reading of his work. I may read about Byron or Orton because the life itself is both well-documented and well worth watching; but Shakespeare’s life is neither. How he behaved, what he endured, who he knew, where he went – such information does not expand or deepen my grasp of ...”