“... on a book spine refers to what is inside the volume’. He pursues the speculation further: ‘We may have here an early hint of an important component of religious thought: immanence. Gods and supernatural powers can be inside statues, mountains, lakes, seas, nature itself, and of course people.’ We also have here – though the fact does not concern ...”

“... Tower had its 15 minutes of fame in 2013 when a helicopter, on the way to pick up the tycoon Richard Caring, hit it in fog and crashed, killing the pilot and a pedestrian on his way to work. It is a building so ugly and so out of place – so disproportionate, so brutally disrespectful of its environment and context – that you will, if you pass it ...”

“... God help me, I had lucky zits – if you see me in the next few years and my face is cratered like Richard Burton’s, you’ll know why. Most important, I had to wear an ugly pair of red velvet shoes that looked like horse hooves, which I had also worn on Election Day in 2012. The vegan leather had crumbled badly since the Obama administration, which must be ...”

“... back of a truck talking to a girl as the sun goes down.’ His attachment to quiet epiphanies here may strike us as a little dated: but perhaps it shouldn’t, since these are hardly period-specific pleasures. And one wouldn’t want to line up with the point-scoring American film critics of today, reviled by Wenders in the Introduction as lacking ‘modesty ...”

“... content and moral force that they continue to mark a deep cleavage in Western philosophising. Jung may have meant that we start out as realists or nominalists and follow our assigned destinies. His maxim reaches far beyond that. We are either Plato’s friend or Aristotle’s friend. Murdoch brings her friends, Schopenhauer, Simone ...”

“... rewards and punishments, the hope of heaven and the threat of hell, to be effective. ‘Virtue may owe her panegyrics to morality, but must derive her authority from religion.’ This analysis is a particular application of a more general principle. Johnson believed that all human effort springs from the elementary passions of avoiding pain and seeking ...”

“... intended, for all your rational revulsion or boredom or disapproval of the outworn ideologies they may sanction. The last dissenting emotion is perhaps the one most frequently aroused at present. Children’s stories from the past are continually disparaged for being insufficiently egalitarian, or wide-ranging, or whatever. Robert Leeson, in Reading and ...”

“... Geof instead. Helen and Jo, it seems, don’t expect to live stupidly ever after.Helen and Jo may have low expectations but they have strong desires – for romance, sex, fun, colour, ‘a taste of honey’. Men offer that, if only fleetingly, and Helen and Jo grab it with both hands. ‘Listen, love, I’m old enough to be your mother,’ Helen tells ...”

“... to withdraw his trust from the ideas he has picked up over the years from his senses. They may not be perfectly systematic or ideally precise, and he knows they have sometimes misled him; but he sees no point in supposing that his entire experience of the world might be shot through with vanity and delusion. He tries to reassure himself by recalling a ...”

“... of Hizbollah (which was to play the major role in finally driving the Israelis out of Lebanon in May 2000). Faced with the prospect of Israeli vassalage after Sharon’s Army had in effect brought about his election, Gemayel seems to have demurred and was assassinated on 14 September. Israeli troops occupied Beirut, supposedly to keep order, and two days ...”

“... allowed the pope to hire and fire his English bishops and give their dioceses English placenames. Richard II’s prime aim in the Great Praemunire Statute of 1392 was to prevent the pope and his favoured cardinals from taking juicy revenues out of England. British membership of the EU has, per contra, attracted billions of foreign capital to Britain, while ...”

“... supported by the money his brother made. His even greater good fortune was to have an uncle, Richard Lloyd, who believed in him and backed him, convinced that he was a prodigy – an opinion Lloyd George shared. From the earliest days, there were scandals relating to affairs and paternity suits to be hushed up; the list of his conquests would include ...”

“... surely Attlee’s most important speech, after Chamberlain, deserted by ninety of his own MPs in May 1940, appealed to Attlee to join him in a national government. Attlee’s reply (‘Prime minister, our party won’t have you and I think I am right in saying that the country won’t have you either’) was what made Churchill prime minister – as fateful ...”

“... minimalist works, and to some extent of Einstein. When you look at what’s being repeated, you may wonder at the tolerance of those who can happily sit for ten or 15 minutes at a stretch listening to the same commonplace two or four-beat figure over and over, without audible variation. Compare the opening of Akhnaten with the introduction to Handel’s ...”

“... which the novel creates its fevered satirical vision. It’s reminiscent, in different ways, of Richard Brautigan and of Ed Dorn’s Gunslinger, as well as of Burroughs, but it seems not to have been a way of writing she wanted to continue with. One of the strengths of the new collection is that it contains the unfinished draft of the novel Quin was writing ...”