“... Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and whatever else flew into your consciousness) you got something more like a second-hand bookshop – a place where you could rummage pleasurably for hours and come away with a quite different idea from what you thought you might have been looking for. There are no amateur readers like myself represented in Goffman’s ...”

“... harsh: frosts arrived a little later in the year, snows thawed a little earlier, and harvests were more abundant. Quebec soon became an improbable cause célèbre of Enlightenment climatology. For Pehr Kalm, a disciple of Linnaeus, it was a paragon of good colonial husbandry. The French naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon went further. He saw in ...”

“... early, often when the girls were still infants; there would likely be a series of explorations, more or less serious, before one intricate set of negotiations made it to completion. Since it was rarely wise to marry a daughter into one of the noble families of one’s own realm and thus disturb political balances, the consequence for the princess was ...”

“... the same true of his friend Kingsley Amis, who hazarded the shrewd guess that Larkin published no more novels because he feared failure, in that genre, of the power to keep going with his own separate world of art? It seems likely that Amis has done something which in terms of the novel may be more difficult, and that is to ...”

“... that he is insufficiently understood. Few political writers anywhere and at any time have been more prolific or had more impact on their contemporaries. His newspaper The Political Register, which appeared at intervals between 1802 and 1835, sold at its peak of popularity up to 70,000 copies an issue and was read by ...”

“... are entirely confident that whatever limited niche they allot the judiciary, the judges will be more than happy to squeeze dutifully into it. They should be made to think again. I like to think that if he were suddenly transposed to the present, Lord Russell of Killowen, with his experience of the Parnell Commission and his 19th-century Irish ...”

“... for her body ‘as it was the last time she really liked it’. And lo, she finds herself once more housed in the ‘serviceable and agreeable’ form she possessed some fifteen years earlier, bearing some marks of experience (an appendix scar), but otherwise compact, neat, strong. She feels wonderful. ‘I can go in the streets, she said to herself, and ...”

“... the name of God was blasphemy and the penalty was stoning to death. The prohibition is stated in more general and familiar terms in the third commandment (Exodus 20.7). The idea got more complicated when applied to the more complicated God of Christianity; for instance, it was blasphemy ...”

“... snaps her fingers at the law and all its pains and punishments and cries out for new victims and more gold. Can that woman sleep?’Restell monetised the desperation of other women into a supremely lucrative business. In 1860, the Chicago Tribune reported that ‘she has three grandchildren who will inherit about $400,000 when Madame Restell turns up her ...”

“... is not beautiful. But that is part of Brown’s point, for he was after qualities that counted for more than beauty. Its subject was carefully chosen. Brown knew that sewers mattered. The threat of cholera haunted Mid-Victorian England, and only efficient sanitation could remove it. Seeing a group of labourers excavating some of the first suburban sewers in ...”

“... insulted. I don’t want to call the book a masterpiece: it isn’t that – but at least it is more a work of art than a disappearing act. The novels by C.K. Stead and Rudolf Nassauer, on the other hand, are distinctly shifty and slippery. The Death of the Body is an elegant contraption whose mainspring is double-time. Although we have been plentifully ...”

“... whether Jews could licitly demand interest from non-Jews remained a point of theological debate. Thomas Aquinas, one of the most influential medieval opponents of usury, described it as an unlawful attempt to charge someone for the use of time itself. For later defenders of interest this was what made it so useful: it was an enticement to get someone to part ...”

“... Rodney Hall tells of a convict at large in New South Wales in 1838, caught up in larger, even more powerful cycles of captivity and exploitation, until he finds temporary sanctuary with an Aboriginal tribe and becomes ‘the very centre of their circle’. Both novels end with violence: but only Carey’s has the nervous optimism to suggest that this ...”

“... friend Hemingway, who tried to bluff his way into a venerable old age. Dos Passos became more invisible and more cranky with each book he published after the USA trilogy. Of the stars of the class of 1918, only William Faulkner survived gracefully, protected by a thick cloak of obscurity until the very end. The ...”

“... and gas reserves than Saudi Arabia and will continue to profit from rising oil prices for several more years. But as the world shifts to alternative energy sources – Gustafson projects a peak in global demand for fossil fuels around 2030, followed by a swift decline – its hydrocarbon revenues will dwindle. What’s ...”