“... literary company. Between the lines, you glimpse a lovable character bursting with curiosity: a David Attenborough of the cultural world, taking pleasure in every manifestation of symbolic activity from the humblest to the most magnificent. (He even embraced some snarky barbs directed at him by Heidegger and his students.) This congenial impression is ...”

“... distils the message of the assault on the NGOs: they are accomplices to murder, and traitors. A young, bearded Arab man facing the viewer raises his arm to attack, then the image freezes and a female announcer tells us: Before the next terrorist stabs you, he already knows that Yishai Menuhin, a planted agent belonging to Holland, will make sure to protect ...”

“... believer than the secular intellectuals he sneered at? The evidence is inconclusive. Although as a young man he had considered ordination, the more the older Cowling obsessed over religion the less he seemed to be interested in Christianity as either transcendence or moral guide. Instead, like a plumber seeking the appropriate rod for unblocking a drain, he ...”

“... squares, cubes. He has understood many of their properties; his powers seem to match those of the young Gauss. He throws off a version of Russell’s paradox in a teasing aside to his father. He gives Roz a drawing to take away, a puzzling pattern of numerals. She works out that it represents factorials and constitutes a proof that the nth difference of xn is ...”

“... close relations with North Korea, welcoming delegates from the DPRK to its congresses and sending young members to Pyongyang to see what a socialist society looked like. They were completely unprepared for the collapse of the Communist regimes in Eastern Europe, which came just after the high point of the Workers’ Party’s political success, when its ...”

“... Americans seem to relish Presidential biographies. David McCullough’s Truman (1992) was on the bestseller lists for the better part of a year, and his John Adams (2001) is providing an astonishing repeat performance. Robert Caro’s dramatically detailed look at The Years of Lyndon Johnson has been unfolding since 1982, and large chunks of Volume Three have been serialised in the New Yorker ...”

“... carapaces into the Beagle’s wake. Four small tortoises did make it back to England but were too young to have developed island-specific characteristics. The finches – emblematic of Darwin’s greatest Galapagos triumph – were in fact his nadir. Not only did he fail to label which islands his specimens came from, but he completely overlooked the ...”

“... in The Ploughman’s Lunch (1983), the script for which was written by McEwan. In both cases, a young man from a class background about which he is very uneasy, who has an ailing mother, an interest in history, and wishes to write a book, falls for a girl from an upper-middle-class, bohemian family, only to find that she will not sleep with him. The ...”

“... actually an extremely complex period, in which she tried to re-establish her influence over the young James VI, amid interminable negotiations over a compromise that would bring her captivity to an end. Mary’s demise was the result of yet another plot, the Babington Plot of 1586. This was a plan to murder Elizabeth and free Mary, to which Mary famously ...”

“... One thing the Tate retrospective brought home to me was the depth of Nash’s attachment as a young man to Blake, and to the Rossetti strain of Pre-Raphaelitism; and this helped me understand why so much from the past of the landscape tradition that might have helped him – been adaptable to 20th-century purposes – remained essentially unavailable to ...”

“... he might be tempted to make such a barely thinkable journey, it was now. He was 31, famous for the David and the Pietà, but his dealings with the pope were deadlocked. If Europe’s ultimate patron was being difficult, perhaps a more obliging one could be found elsewhere. In his author’s note, Enard cannily stops short of asserting the factuality of the ...”

“... as their children did not, the kind of country they were living in. Unlike Roberto Bolaño, a young adult at the time of the coup, or José Donoso, then at the height of his fame, these writers didn’t experience military rule as a rupture with the past but as the unremarkable norm. This has resulted in a very specific strain of metafiction, concerned ...”

“... looked. Dowd is the author of a book that claims Covid vaccines are killing people, especially the young and apparently fit.Klein herself, by contrast, is famous for the calm and poise with which she mainstreams a clear, solidly leftist political-economic critique: brands and marketing in No Logo (1999), the neoliberal takeover in The Shock Doctrine ...”

“... and law, but in his own day was a controversial figure. The Provençal rabbi Abraham ben David (‘Rabad’) criticised him for, among other things, his insistence that God is not embodied. After his death in 1204, Jews living in Montpellier helped persuade the Christian authorities to burn copies of his greatest philosophical work, The Guide to the ...”

“... looks were stunning – it is the only appropriate adjective’; W.B. Yeats: ‘the handsomest young man in England’; H.W. Nevinson: ‘the whole effect was almost ludicrously beautiful’). The principal driver of myth-creation was the sonnets, whose notion of willing sacrifice in a noble cause had unerringly caught the public mood in this early ...”