“... the preserves of serious fiction’, is clarifying.He quotes a disparaging review by John Updike of the English translation of Abdel Rahman Munif’s Mudun al Malh, or Cities of Salt (in his own review, Ghosh called it a ‘work of immense significance’; here, as throughout the book, his shift of focus away from the West is both salutary and ...”

“... by her appeal as a Dorothy Doolittle and queer icon. Her paintings languish in the reserves of major museums, while in Paris her name mostly evokes the euphoric gay club in Buttes-Chaumont park. Bonheur’s vast body of work is surprisingly various, both in medium and subject (some of her landscapes without animals are exceptional). Being so commercially ...”

“... identical versions of a pamphlet published in 1715. The grounds for allocating these items to John Oldmixon took many pages to set out, and include both ‘internal’ and ‘external’ evidence. Furbank and Owens rate the latter much more highly, but this may be in part because they associate internal evidence with the dredging up of ‘favourite ...”

“... different requirements for entry, and boys and girls spent their days travelling for interviews. John Morrison, the tutor of Trinity, tried to get the colleges to agree to a uniform procedure, but Armitage of Queen’s and Pratt of Christ’s fought him until the establishment of UCCA forced Cambridge to take its head out of the sand. Another reason was ...”

“... and urban scene of the Eighties, whose humour can make one wince, and the energy and wit of the major plot development that follows. Its climax, before the earth is extinguished, is the idyll in which reason becomes sexually incarnate, as the heroine lakes the star-captive into her arms – in the eden of a park ‘landscaped in the 1740s’, and ‘made ...”

“... interior pantomime, did not ideally suit him to army life. Nor did things improve when his friend Major-General Sir Robert Laycock arranged for his transfer from the Commandos to the Guards. If anything, his time in the Guards was even less happy than his spell as a Marine. When his superior officer, Lord Lovat, who had seen him drunk in the bar at White’s ...”

“... of the high philology of the humanists as a record of the high art of Renaissance social life. The major single piece of progress has consisted in a documentary discovery made by John Shearman and Webster Smith. They showed that the painting originally hung not in the villa of Castello, which belonged after 1477 or 1478 to ...”

“... at Bootham School may have provoked an immediate countervailing effect in a cynical repudiation of John Bright; but in Birmingham Town Hall on 12 May 1958, exactly one hundred years after Bright had spoken there, Taylor concluded his own speech to a CND meeting by echoing Bright’s words (and shed his own tears with his old history master afterwards). What ...”

“... to Nicholas Hawksmoor, upon whose professional expertise he relied for the realisation of all his major buildings.’ The engineers, Arups, are Rogers’s Hawksmoor, Laurie Abbott and others his ‘Arthur’. Rogers, who was a dyslexic and could hardly read before he was 11, who even now finds that ‘ordered prose in the smallest quantities can take him ...”

“... most persistent is the myth of Orwell as the conscience of his generation. In a time when other major writers made their reputations out of formal innovation and modernist vision, Orwell made his out of rectitude; I can’t think of another modern writer whose principal virtue is generally agreed to be his virtue. This idea of Orwell has two evident ...”

“... that the SA was generally more successful than the Nazi Party in recruiting workers, especially in major urban areas. There we find a significant level of switchovers between Brownshirts and Communists through the depression years. In 1933 the SA would have included both those who had joined out of a vaguely articulated working-class bitterness, and ...”

“... a passport to a conference in Paris, or of befriending a Western foreigner, was to visit a certain Major Kowalski now and then and invent some harmless platitudes – cheap at that price. A few of my friends admitted this and joked about it. Others kept it delicately unsaid. They were reluctant informers, not professional spooks out to entrap me, and knowing ...”

“... weren’t necessarily full-time or jobs for the duration of the project), but only a few of the major contracts have gone to British firms. Tunnelling contracts have been awarded to the UK’s BAM Nuttall, Balfour Beatty and Kier Group, but also to Ireland’s John Sisk & Son, Austria’s Alpine BeMo and the Spanish firms ...”

“... The Political Lives of Dead Bodies: Reburial and Post-Socialist Change (1999) and more briefly in John Gray’s The Immortalisation Commission.* Preserving Lenin’s body from further decay is a bit like painting the Forth Bridge: every 18 months the body is bathed in a potassium acetate-glycerin solution and careful maintenance done on the accumulating skin ...”

“... idea is simple, however, and it’s one on which Johnston finds ‘massive consensus, across the major religions’, which harbour correct ethical ideas in spite of their endemic idolatry. Acquiring a good will is a matter of anatta as above – complete dissolution of the selfish local self. A good will is ‘a disposition to absorb the legitimate interests ...”