“... kid with EkaSystems Inc, and earning at least half a million a year . . . Alas, much of Zadie Smith’s second novel reads like this. (It’s better written, but she had two years, and I had two minutes.) White Teeth, for all its many miracles, occasionally revealed a cartoonish energy that at times seemed to amount to a fear of silence, a perpetual ...”

“... from Stockport, Cheshire, who were commissioned to re-create the scenes that the TV man John McCarthy would have missed during his captivity. Employed by the same organisation as McCarthy’s friend Jill Morrell, I was asked by the children to pass on a collection of their work to her. One picture had been painted by a boy called Timothy, who was ...”

“... of a head, the angle of a leg, or the loop of a skipping rope add movement. English painters like John Bratby and Jack Smith were drawing on similar subjects with a not dissimilar, calculated clumsiness that trades crispness for directness, as though seeking to match the thing drawn in the accent of the ...”

“... and Concerning the Principles of Morals, was first published in 1739. His friend Adam Smith’s most famous work An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations appeared in 1776, the year of Hume’s death. Hume had been born in 1711 and Smith in 1723. ...”

“... Richard Perceval Graves. It takes over where the author’s father, Robert’s younger brother John Graves, left off. John, who died in 1980, had been described by Robert as a ‘typically good pupil of a typically good school’ (to which he returned as teacher); he had for long contemplated the composition of a book ...”

“... for instance, is both meticulous and plausible. The same can hardly be said of Martin Seymour-Smith in his new critical biography of Kipling. In addition to being one of the most lopsided lives ever written – 23 chapters on the first forty years, only two chapters on the last thirty – this is also one of the most incorrigible in its ...”

“... will crumble and where the new frontiers will coalesce. Medawar’s ‘genius’, his colleague John Maynard Smith told me, ‘was a bit unexpected. He had a genius for thinking of the right experiment which I enormously envy. I don’t have it myself: I never think of the right experiment. If I do an experiment at ...”

“... sinfulness, until Jesus finally shows mercy and lets her in. In Fables, Ancient and Modern (1700), John Dryden rendered ‘The Wife of Bath’s Tale’ in contemporary English, ‘not daring … to adventure on her prologue, because ’tis too licentious’. Voltaire took the opposite approach: when he reworked Dryden’s version in the 1760s, he made it even ...”

“... The title of Frances FitzGerald’s new book comes from the sermon John Winthrop, first governor of Massachusetts Bay Colony, delivered on board the Arabella shortly before landing in the New World in 1630. Fully conscious of the exemplary character of their enterprise, he urged his companions to walk humbly in the ways of God by remaining true to the Puritan tenets of a faith they could no longer practise in England ...”

“... reached a decision that President Andrew Jackson disliked, Jackson is said to have remarked: ‘John Marshall has made his decision, now let him enforce it.’) If the court’s decisions are not seen as legitimate, its power could fade.Stephen Breyer, a Supreme Court justice since 1994, is concerned that this power is under threat. In his new book, The ...”

“... of a sailing ship on the rough sea coming suddenly alive and sucking in the children?’ Stevie Smith asked, reviewing C.S. Lewis’s The Voyage of the Dawn Treader in 1952. She liked depictions of people who disappeared into the objects of their gaze; a couple of years earlier, her poem ‘Deeply Morbid’ told the story of Joan, an office girl who goes to ...”

“... answer!’ Pastor Stephen Mitchell was proclaiming ‘the glorious gospel’ at John White’s Church on Sunday morning. Pastor Mitchell, who is in his early thirties, spoke of the ‘gross indecency’ of Chaldee in Abraham’s day. ‘Is this not a picture of our own province?’ he asked. ‘God is still calling out Abrahams. He called ...”

“... and it would not be surprising if the first resignation were to come from Liam Fox or Iain Duncan Smith rather than Vince Cable. No doubt each of them has genuine objections to aspects of coalition policy. But if any of the three were to walk away, it would be as much from thwarted ambition – one of them was party leader, while the other two might have been ...”

“... puzzle was that well-meaning visitors had been sousing the patients’ dressings with holy water. John Blake, a surgeon at the Royal Victoria Eye and Ear Hospital in Dublin, twice put off a cataract operation on a woman of 72 after she developed conjunctivitis. The woman had bought a statuette of the Madonna which was equipped with a reservoir of holy ...”

“... Like many forceful Victorian women, Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon had a strong father and an obscure mother. Benjamin Smith, known in the family as ‘the Pater’, came from a formidable line of radical activists who had campaigned vigorously against the slave trade, and fostered projects for educational and political reform ...”