“... of knowing what he’s doing but who for some reason seems to be taking one round the houses. It may be that The Nature of the Book is most rewardingly approached not in the hope of finding a coherent thesis in it but as a miscellany of essays, or perhaps as an attempt to write too many interesting books at once. Johns’s starting-point is indignation. He ...”

“... Reich’s breezy confidence that where America leads the rest of the world will eventually follow may be – fortunately in some respects – misplaced. ‘Technology is speeding and broadening access to terrific deals,’ Reich believes. Buyers and investors can switch to something better with ever increasing ease. In order to survive in this new era of ...”

“... be of a good beliefe.’ ‘Nay, we must go further than hope well,’ Theologus replies. ‘We may not venture our salvation upon uncertaine hopes. As, if a man should hope it would be a faire day tomorrow; but he cannot certainly tell. No, no. We must in this case, being of such infinite importance as it is, grow to some certainty and full ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Even when we meet with a fact about the artist (and there are a good many new ones here) – it may be about the family timber business, about the artist’s investments in land, about his endless pursuit of benefices for his unworthy son Pomponio or of emoluments for himself – we seem to be considering commonplace behaviour rather than anything ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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’ ...”

“... doesn’t seem too bold to suggest that the book isn’t deeply concerned with moral problems, and may not be aspiring to depth in the first place. (This is not the same as calling it shallow.) It sets out, though with no announcement of the fact, to open up a particular sort of imaginative, even imaginary space, though there are McEwan themes that seem to ...”

“... hit in Russia, where it won two literary prizes, and in Germany. One explanation for this may be that the reading public has a greater appetite for experimental fiction than the cynics believe. Another may be the nature of Shishkin’s experiment, which relates to the enclosure, rather than to the entirety of its ...”

“... of stage props?’ Then he adds, a little sadly: ‘The only difference is that our predecessors may have truly believed. I cannot believe; I know too much.’ This confession gets at a major problem faced by contemporary doctors. The more effective their medical technology, the less faith they have in the power of their office. Doctors have come to believe ...”

“... and had a special class of men trained up to do just that. Present-day America has not, and this may account for some of the undoubted blunders in postwar Iraq. Lord Cromer, born Evelyn Baring, came from that class. With Lords Curzon and Milner, he was one of the trio of great imperial proconsuls in late Victorian and Edwardian Britain. He has always seemed ...”

“... in three languages. Then, suddenly, she turned her back on dancing and began to manifest what may have been symptoms of mental illness. Why Lucia gave up dancing is not clear, and Shloss refrains from rushing to judgment. She may have had an abortion which injured her health, or the jealous Nora ...”

“... refer to repeated attempts to fit its imagery to new circumstances. Several imply that, while they may have left the statue in place, the Flavian dynasty made efforts to remove its Neronian associations (perhaps changing Nero’s facial features to be more unambiguously those of the Sun God; although some people, we are told, detected a resemblance to the ...”

“... 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 ...”