“... Shakespeare’s defining knacks, so it’s said, is his ability to render his own time and place more or less irrelevant to the appreciation of his art. So although it seemed uncontroversial when Paul Salzman recently related a rich and miscellaneous clutch of Jacobean publications (Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, Donne’s elegies, Wroth’s Urania and ...”

“... contemporaries, between great thinkers and lesser fry, political thought was reckoned to be a more elevated – if stilted – affair, of giant responding unto giant, sometimes across centuries of silence. Its history belonged not to historians but to philosophers; and political scientists, broadly speaking, concurred. They too studied political thought ...”

“... Elfriede Jelinek’s​ eleven novels and more than twenty plays have few plausible characters and even fewer parsable plots. When she was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2004, the committee praised ‘her musical flow of voices and counter-voices’, which ‘reveal the absurdity of society’s clichés and their subjugating power ...”

“... give way to a less appalled reaction: ‘Elaine just said she was surprised it didn’t happen more often … I mean … it’s something to do.’Murray was born in Dublin in 1975, and his work explores the struggle, as one of his characters puts it, between ‘the quote-unquote “new” Ireland, the Ireland of technology and communication and gender ...”

“... first approach was pioneered by a number of Marxist scholars. Marxism has always been drawn to the more active phases of history, and its volcanic eruptions, the moments of revolution. But most of history has been far more static, even regressive, for reasons among which human nature must rank high, or what Peter Clarke in a ...”

“... wonderful fertility. At this point Warner turns to historical context, listing the bill of fare at Thomas Coram’s Foundling Hospital – lots of gruel, porridge and potatoes – but the Gingerbread House which traps Hansel and Gretel seems to have deeper roots in the imagination than hunger and a dull diet. It belongs to the same imaginative zone as the ...”

“... over five years – while the first volume deals with nine. Cosima now knew Wagner better and felt more (though never totally) confident in handling her new husband; her guilt at abandoning Von Bülow grew blunter. As a consequence, her observations are more revealing. In the first volume the composition of the last act of ...”

“... if these were commissioned or done for personal pleasure. Nor do we have any idea why Fragonard more or less gave up painting in his fifties, though the Revolution probably had something to do with it. Much of what we do know about him has been shaped by his reception in the 19th century. Having been utterly forgotten, he was rediscovered ...”

“... Vidal once called the ‘Research and Development’ arm of American fiction – the tradition of Thomas Pynchon, Robert Coover, William Gaddis and Don DeLillo. That might not sound hard if you think of R&D as a matter of surface effects: pop-cultural references, metafictional gestures, glazed irony and so on. But for Moody (b.1961), as for Jonathan Franzen ...”

“... to deliver annoying homilies against big government and environmentalism. In the end, Genome is more soapbox than synopsis. Ridley structures the book eccentrically, with its 23 chapters numbered (and titled) to correspond to our chromosome pairs. From each chromosome, he picks a single gene to inspire an essay on a big question ...”

“... the liver to pour out glucose as fuel for muscles, the airways to open in order to make breathing more effective, the heart to accelerate and the pupils to dilate. Its effect on the brain is to make us more attentive and alert. An overdose can be fatal. The cadaver’s adrenals curled around the upper poles of the kidneys ...”

“... or ‘buried’. It’s the only figure of speech which not only everyone uses but which more or less everyone can name, even if they can’t instantly rattle off the OED’s definition of it as ‘a figure of speech in which a name or descriptive word or phrase is transferred to an object or action different from, but analogous to, that to which it ...”

“... once. When Mary was swept into her mother’s marriage crisis, the emperor was their chief friend. More than any other English monarch between Henry II and Charles II, Mary was preoccupied with a country beyond the sea, or rather a dynasty beyond the sea. She married Charles’s son Philip, and once she was married she was desperate to secure a Catholic future ...”

“... his day and good riddance. Don’t be deceived by the slick subtitles, however. Peter Lake knows more than anyone else about the religious culture of the secondary and tertiary stages of the English Reformation. This is not only a book of dazzling brilliance and acute intelligence, it has many important things to say about the construction, deconstruction ...”

“... a light but sure touch’, as if she were being praised for her pastry. Johnson’s writing is more industrial than domestic. From an early age, she kept the show on the road. Her absentee father, a colonial civil servant, dropped dead when she was 12, leaving Pamela and her mother penniless. She left school at 16, worked as a secretary, and wrote stories ...”