“... was erratic, dependent on the variable enthusiasm of individuals such as Carnot, Hoche and Bruix. More important, France under the Directory was barely a revolutionary polity. Driven by force of circumstance, it was descending from idealistic internationalism into chauvinistic imperialism. The hostility of the other great powers, culminating in the Second ...”

“... an attractive option for young men who didn’t have the connections to establish themselves in more traditional professions, or who had damaged their reputations early and were looking for a way out or a second chance). The vast growth of the British army during the Napoleonic Wars – and its high attrition rates – made room for hundreds of new ...”

“... fires of hell’. The Church frowns on masturbation, but the code of Mexican machismo is more permissive, even allowing for deviations from heterosexuality: a limited range of acts is licensed for men clearly labelled as gay and inferior. It turns out these acts are not only convenient but addictive.The police beat up suspects as a matter of ...”

“... a contraction not just of time, the daylight hours, but of possibility. Everything grows more chromatic: the late sunshine, the shop windows, the cars. And then evening arrives like an orange rolling off a table.’ Or this. Someone who may or may not be Specktor is on a date with Q, a television writer:We sat for three and a half hours, after which ...”

“... 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 ...”