“... whirlwind trip around European thought, with seven and a half pages on Hegel, one and a bit on David Hume and so on. The Monty Python ‘Summarise Proust’ contest, in which competitors had thirty seconds to deliver a précis, springs irresistibly to mind. Like the motion of desire itself, the book drives remorselessly from one author to another, raiding ...”

“... Wheeldon and Kyle Abraham, alongside classic ballets by Kenneth MacMillan and Frederick Ashton. In May and June, ahead of the full reopening, the company streamed an online programme featuring choreographers closely associated with the Royal Ballet. One name was conspicuous by its absence: Liam Scarlett, the former Royal Ballet artist-in-residence. In March ...”

“... against the interlopers by inventing evangelistic exploits for ancient saints like Dyfrig or David. Malcolm Lambert is a judicious guide to the shifting opinions of scholars amid these quicksands, casting a sceptical eye even on Bede’s motives for glorifying and sanitising the Roman mission to the Anglo-Saxons. What makes Lambert’s account so ...”

“... are not the end of the book. We turn the page and read a quotation from the American novelist David Markson: ‘Or was it possibly nothing more than a fundamentally recognisable genre all the while, no matter what Writer averred? Nothing more or less than a read?’ We can take the question as referring both to the described movie and to the describing ...”

“... obscuring the fact that our existence has ‘no more meaning than the life of a slime mould’. David Brooks, author of the bestselling pop-science Bildungsroman The Social Animal, explains that his fictional everywoman ‘Erica’ is slow to trust ‘Harold’ because ‘while Pleistocene men could pick their mates on the basis of fertility cues ...”

“... twinklers of an hour, provoke my rage’) for Pope himself. Gerrard follows Howard Weinbrot and David Fairer in championing Hill’s biblical odes The Creation (1720) and The Judgment Day (1721) as significant expositions of the sublime in an age addicted to correctness; but the argument isn’t likely to persuade readers confronted by lines as poor as the ...”

“... that some of the first and fiercest episodes in the Indian Mutiny played themselves out. On 11 May, rebelling sepoys of the Bengal Army crossed the River Jumna and called on the Mughal emperor Bahadur Shah to serve as their protector. Next, they turned their attention to the British civilians who clustered in the area around the church, slaughtering the ...”

“... and to find narrative forms that suited his slippery subject. The point is that the slackness may be as important as the precision; and that there are whole reaches of the novels that are neither slack nor precise but something else. Durrell wrote a lot before and after the Quartet: poems, plays, a book about Cyprus, other novels. T.S. Eliot greatly ...”

“... prince, has been slipping. The woman modern scholarship gives us has been neatly summed up by David Cannadine: ‘A workaday regnant queen, shorn of her glitter and her gold, her glamour and her greatness, with a false face, a disturbed psyche, a heart of stone, a barren womb and feet of clay; and as such a woman trying to do a man’s job, but not always ...”

“... introduction to NeoRealismo: The New Image in Italy 1932-60.* The political ideology of Neorealism may have been diffuse, in some ways Catholic and in others communist, but its mission was focused. The aim was to give a presence to those who had been invisible and a voice to the voiceless: the poor, the dispossessed, the unemployed, peasants, children and ...”

“... to open a juke joint, and buy a derelict mill from the town’s closeted KKK leader, Hogwood (David Maldonado). The twins enlist their cousin Sammie (Miles Caton), a sharecropper and precociously talented preacher’s boy who sings and plays the blues, and assemble a crew of old friends and lovers to do up the place, which they call Club Juke.Stack and ...”

“... with the infirmities of old age.’ She is indeed ready to die, and it is a difficulty that Justin may feel that he has to do the same. In the Sudan she declares: ‘My time is up.’ She is infatuated with a handsome police chief, goes rather grimly to bed with him in the time he can spare from gambling sessions, and then kills herself. Justin goes back to ...”

“... business: theirs was to pay and obey. Their leaders promised not to repeat their lèse-majesté. David Landes takes the story from the scholar of Islam, Michael Cook. It is, for him, a moral tale. Autocracies squeeze, steal and demean. ‘Only societies with room for multiple initiatives,’ he insists, ‘from below more than from above, can think in terms ...”

“... known as the periphery doctrine, put in place in the 1950s by Israel’s founding prime minister, David Ben Gurion, and the first heads of Israel’s foreign intelligence service, the Mossad. The strategy’s basic premise was that Israel faced a proximate ‘core’ of implacable Arab hostility, which could be countered only through action at its ...”

“... Much has been said about Afghan corruption, and with justification, but many were aggrieved when David Petraeus, the commander of US forces in the country, said that corruption had been part of Afghan culture for ‘however long this country has … been in existence’. Many Afghans dispute this, saying that corruption was manageable under the ...”