“... New World is, by the same token, a ‘high concept’ novel, for its premise can be stated even more succinctly: ‘Tintin grows up.’ In Tuten’s hands (and with the personal blessing, we are told, of his friend and mentor Hergé), the cherub-faced, boundlessly intrepid teenager achieves a miraculous release from his forty-year pre-adolescence and is ...”

“... The more people feel that modern medicine has let them down, or at least has failed to live up to its own exalted expectations, the more alluring the prospect of looking to China as an alternative source of medical theory and practice. After all, China offers one of the very few medical traditions which continue to hold their own in the face of the hegemony of the Western medical model ...”

“... and has refrained from chasing the metaphysical ignes fatui that bedevil so many of his ostensibly more ambitious pieces, he has scored some remarkable successes. Poems such as ‘Fetching Cows’, ‘Movements’ and ‘Notations of Ten Summer Minutes’, which aspire to be not much more than inventories of casual ...”

“... that increasingly, as the century went on, people thought of their private lives as far more authentic than their working lives, even though work had the immense moral force of being dutiful. Karlin reports that ‘more volumes of poetry appeared in the 19th century than in the two preceding ones combined.’ It ...”

“... both in the practical sense that armies were sent frequently into battle, but also in the more amorphous sense that national identity was shaped by the memory of the Hundred Years War. Henry was highly conscious of the military achievements of his ancestors, especially Henry V, in France. He itched to fight, even in obese middle age: he had a huge ...”

“... to ‘Greek religion’. The phrase first appeared in print in English in 1654; it became more common in the middle of the 18th century, and reached a peak of popularity in the 19th. This is of course a crude index (and the picture is subtly different in other European languages), but it’s a reminder that, whatever its deeper roots, religion as a ...”

“... beside a muzzled bore, When the Rudyards cease from Kipling     And the Haggards Ride no more. The Haggards have ridden rather precariously since the decline of Empire, if at all. But the next few years promise no end of Kipling. When copyright runs out, his work will be published extensively in paperback, and may or may not be read. Kipling is a ...”

“... as a private detective watching the jewels at the Claudius-Gertrude wedding feast, may have said more than he knew. Yet to praise Hamlet as the first detective story makes sense mainly in terms of a conceit, feasible partly because ridiculous. Literary artists have worked in the genre: Poe, Wilkie Collins, Simenon, Chandler and Michael Innes among ...”

“... something of an academic flop later on. A passionate left-wing polemicist, he nonetheless retained more than a few traces of his public-school breeding, including a plummy accent and a horde of posh friends. He combined cultural Englishness with political cosmopolitanism, and detested political personality cults while sedulously cultivating a public image of ...”

“... As we grow older,’ Lucchesi says at sixty, alone, at his desk, ‘we grow more extremely ourselves. Contact depresses us; conversation debilitates.’ Words spoken with forced eloquence, like a bad classical actor in an old movie. And yet, except for hiding himself behind collective pronouns, Lucchesi spoke sincerely ...”

“... what remained of Poland’s Jews. They had a hard time. Of what once amounted to a community of more than three and a half million people, the remnants barely number five thousand. Niezabitowska and Tomaszewski had to travel hundreds of kilometres around Lublin to find a minyan (the ten adult males needed for communal prayer), and among them were two old ...”

“... they can be physically turned the other way up. In Upon the Pun Hammond and Hughes argue that a more promising way for them to have been presented is with a mirror on a table beneath the picture. Arcimboldo’s patron, Rudolf II, would have said: ‘Come and see my new painting of the vegetable gardener.’ The visitor replies: ‘I see no gardener, O Holy ...”

“... that way the previous October, at St Giles Circus, to see the hanging, drawing and quartering of Thomas Harrison, the first of the regicides, and he was no more pleased with the congestion then. Citizens in Restoration London were obsessed with the nearness of death, also with shaving minutes off everything you could shave ...”

“... said some colleagues wouldn’t join events with the word ‘refugee’ in the programme: ‘Thomas Mann was a refugee, but we don’t remember him as a “refugee writer”. The classification is problematic.’ Two novels published in English last year reject the paradigm. The Lebanese author Hoda Barakat’s Voices of the Lost came to attention after ...”

“... Gates and George Soros, the CEOs of Google, IBM, Intel, eBay, as well as court-philosophers like Thomas Friedman. The true conservatives today, they argue, are not only the old right, with its ridiculous belief in authority, order and parochial patriotism, but also the old left, with its war against capitalism: both fight their shadow-theatre battles in ...”