“... in the second as in the first novel, some chapters are narrated in the third person, others by one or another of the characters – a technique which may at first seem unnecessarily elaborate or insufficiently exploited, but in time comes to seem right, a gesture of respect for even small differences in perception. Miss Erdrich is as shrewd about ...”

“... David Vann’s novel – his debut, after a short story collection, Legend of a Suicide (2008), and a memoir, A Mile Down (2005) – is a book that makes Cormac McCarthy’s The Road read like a walk in the park. Compared to Caribou Island, The Road is grim-lit lite. After 200 pages of unrelenting misery, McCarthy breaks down and accepts the possibility of grace: after a long trudge through a post-apocalyptic landscape, a woman turns up on the last page, out of the blue, and says: ‘The breath of God was his breath yet though it pass from man to man through all of time ...”

“... days’ observations of the Jovian satellites as he could without missing the deadline imposed by the most important opportunity for intellectual exchange in early modern Europe, the Frankfurt Book Fair. The pamphlet gestured to the possibility of using the satellites as a precise celestial clock, but relied on medieval merchant time to deliver its ...”

“... East or Central Asia were not worth fighting for. In Washington’s eyes, they were sideshows, to be, if not ignored outright, then allocated to diplomats or purveyors of dirty tricks rather than to soldiers. That somewhere like Afghanistan might be worth the life of even a single American would have struck residents of Des ...”

“... serious, that he conducted during their more than 30 years of married life (she died in 1927). By the early 20th century Wells was one of the most fashionable writers in Britain. He rode a bicycle. He looked forward to the formation of a socialist world state. He had many baths (he had en suite bathrooms installed in the house he built for himself at the ...”

“... Douglass wrote, had been ‘so cracked with the frost, that the pen with which I am writing might be laid in the gashes’. And yet the only pieces of advice adult slaves would give him were: don’t look up in the presence of your overseer and avert your gaze from the suffering of others.When he was eight Douglass was sent to Baltimore, to another branch of ...”

“... and artists from the start (Dryden moved to Gerrard Street in 1687 while still poet laureate), and by the mid-18th century thronged with coffee houses and taverns. A blue plaque commemorates Dryden, but on the wrong house. At No. 9, a more accurately sited plaque marks where, in 1764, Joshua Reynolds and Samuel Johnson founded the Literary Club, or simply the ...”

“... so, too, is the story about the void. But the underlying materialist intuition continues to be plausible; everything is the same sort of stuff as familiar, ontologically untendentious objects like rivers, rocks and stars. The whole world is that sort of stuff in its myriad configurations. So construed, materialism is a sound bet on a research ...”

“... to the south) and of the severity of conditions there (there is enough food and water; there would be a plentiful supply of fuel if Hamas stopped hoarding it). But the essential facts can hardly be denied: more than 23,000 deaths, around 1 per cent of the population; the destruction of a third of the buildings in the ...”

“... genocidal antisemitism, take hold in Germany but not elsewhere in Europe? They sought an answer by delving deep into German history, as far back as Martin Luther, or even to the tribes analysed in Tacitus’ ethnography Germania. A version of this model was developed in the 1970s by the so-called Bielefeld School of ...”

“... Carefree:​ that must be the essence of the sporting idea, whether you are doing it with Amaryllis in the shade, or on the village green with your grandchild Wilhelmine. You are disported, carried off out of yourself. In botany, a ‘sport’ is the wayward offshoot of an otherwise predictable shrub. The definition of ‘a real sport’ is a girl like Catherine Morland, the heroine of Northanger Abbey: ‘And it was not very wonderful that Catherine, who had by nature nothing heroic about her, should prefer cricket, baseball, riding on horseback, and running about the country at the age of fourteen, to books ...”

“... in Argentina. Jacobo Timerman was born in Bar in the Ukraine in 1923, and was brought to Argentina by his parents in 1928. From those humble Jewish immigrant origins he made a successful career for himself in Buenos Aires as a journalist and later as a proprietor of periodicals. In 1971 he founded a newspaper, La Opinion. Timerman was no stranger to the ...”

“... monks and friars who excelled in the persecution of heretics, he suggested, had been brutalised by constant exposure to agonising pictures which they associated with the truth of the Christian faith. Several modern writers have interpreted this paradoxical inversion, in which the persecutor sees himself as victim, as a collective version of paranoid ...”

“... translated into English, but the required texts concentrated on war, politics and ethics. Now, by contrast, the life story of the notorious courtesan Neaera, with its episodes of gang rape, blackmail and fraud, is parsed, discussed and analysed in the first-year Greek book used by many schools and universities. The ...”

“... she is a lawyer who works for a law centre, a hard-working Labour councillor, regularly insulted by her Haughey-like Irish comrades. But Saint Jane fails to persuade even her old college Chums that the working-class riot should be tolerated. Hooper is quite surprised to find that the other lunch-party guests take what he ...”