“... a radically one-sided commitment which cuts like a sword through any harmonious whole. The world may present itself as a seamless whole to the disinterested eye of reason, but faith is a matter of passion and the believer is someone in love. Theologically speaking, Kierkegaard is a fideist, holding that faith begins where reason leaves off. He does not see ...”

“... hurt. Keegan does something rare in creating archives of unhappiness, showing the way one sorrow may reverberate with another, how pressure can activate the pain of an old bruise. As a boy, short on Christmas gifts, Furlong had longed for a particular jigsaw puzzle, which had a picture of a farm. Instead he was given a nailbrush, a hot-water bottle and a ...”

“... the task of explaining why we are wrong to underestimate the power of British rain: why, though it may never inspire the immediate awe of a hurricane or a tornado or a Russian purga, it is worthy of respect and fear; and how, even as the mysterious forces of cultural evolution lead more urban Britons to wander about without umbrellas and rainwear, hoping that ...”

“... looks ‘pregnant’. (Whatever cluster of powers, dangers, potentialities, causes and effects may have been gathered up, for the image-maker and his audience, in a notion even roughly equivalent to the question-begging word ‘pregnancy’ is of course a matter of speculation. The archaeologists admit they haven’t much clue.) The sculptor seems to have ...”

“... set in the working-class communities of the North-East in the 1970s. The true answer, I think, may be more uncanny. Barker’s writing has gravitated to war because there’s something wild and unstable in her idiosyncratic vision. In wartime, those social and moral and imaginative securities which might usually seem like fixtures are all overturned. In ...”

“... art, of course, depicts nudes. The Hepburn-like (or horrible-troll-like) naked body, though, may or may not be beautiful. He or she is real. He or she does return the viewer’s gaze. He or she is an active subject of desire – as well as of everything else, to quote Nietzsche, that’s ‘human, all too human’. And ...”

“... could also be counter-productive militarily. It failed to force the Leningraders to surrender, and may even have stiffened their resistance: they knew that if they surrendered they would be starved all the same. As the besieging Quartermaster-General Wagner put it: ‘What are we supposed to do with a city of three and a half million which just rests itself on ...”

“... The natural inference is that there were two communities, each with its own burial ground; there may well have been others nearby, in places where the conditions of the modern city make systematic exploration impossible – on the Quirinal, for instance. The Sacra Via cemetery was closed in the archaeological phase known as Cultura laziale IIA1, in either ...”

“... of Judgment says what is, in Carey’s words, ‘patently untrue’, namely that the beautiful may be so called only if the speaker believes that everybody else shares his opinion, and also that standards of beauty are absolute and universal. From the same unreliable source came the notion that art objects must be of no practical use, provoke no emotion ...”

“... that they went on to discuss heatedly their rival pronunciations of Latin. That shared culture may actually be dead, and that story’s significance may live on only in the eye of sentiment, but I feel bound to carry on regardless, believing that Horace said, matchlessly, a lot of sane and valuable things. When Horace ...”

“... Gallimard sign of literary distinction. Simenon resented this, and his accession to the Pléiade may be seen as the belated recognition he coveted. Is his inclusion the consecration of the idea of a ‘popular’ classic in the age of ‘mass’ literature? This is the answer we might instinctively reach for, but it’s not the one with which the ...”

“... The publication of pictures showing what may happen to Iraqi prisoners at the hands of their captors allowed the outside world to see what Iraqis had known for some time: the occupation is very brutal. In Baghdad, stories had been circulating for months about systematic torture in the prisons. In the US the impact of the photographs was all the greater thanks to the administration’s previous success in controlling news from Iraq ...”

“... a cunning Scottish put-down, since character is just what the English pride themselves on. They may not bestride the world in intellect, cuisine or emotional intimacy, but these fancy pursuits can be left to foreigners, and don’t count for much compared to their own moral robustness. At the core of this moral character lies the spirit of liberty: liberty ...”

“... apnoea enter deep sleep, their airway becomes blocked by the tissues around their throat. They may gasp for air, and stir hundreds of times a night to a level just below conscious awareness. People with sleep apnoea wake up in the morning feeling as if they’ve slept normally, but are chronically tired because their sleep isn’t restorative. As a medical ...”

“... his accounts of hiking into the jungle interior of Trinidad in the search for guppy pools – that may deter many evolutionists. Fortunately, it is possible to approach the question of determinism in the lab, as long as you exercise some ingenuity – and choose the right organism. The Nobel Prize-winning biochemist Hans Krebs once told me that for every ...”