“... product-placement we have come to expect: ‘Christina ... began writing with her 22-carat gold broad-nibbed Parker Duofold pen.’ The artful book-jacket keys us in: a string of pearls, a pair of sunglasses, four wedding rings for four farcical marriages; a scarlet lipstick; the dented tops of two bottles of Diet Coca-Cola. (Diet Coke was Christina’s ...”

“... provides nothing in the way of proof for any of them; his argument consists largely of a series of broad and often glib generalisations. His narrative is confused and fragmented (as well as poorly translated and sloppily published). More to the point, however, this is a book that rests on a highly questionable premise: the familiar claim that fundamentalism is ...”

“... struggle under the oil slick of the Gulf, in a picture grislier than – but indebted to – William Carlos Williams’s poem of 1930s class struggle ‘The Yachts’. And then Rich addresses herself: From shores of sickness you lie out on listless waters with no boundaries  floodplain without horizon dun skies mirroring its opaque face and nothing not ...”

“... a demand for intelligibility and reassurance, an insistence on them. A comparison can be made with William James, writing about these matters a little over a hundred years ago in his book Pragmatism. For James, who embraced Darwinism, the problem was not materialism’s past, but its future. Physics foretold a future in which all life would eventually die out ...”

“... Here is the visiting lecturer, Lord Pinkrose:   He was a rounded man, narrow-shouldered and broad-hipped, thickening down from the crown of his hat to the edge of his greatcoat. His nose, blunt and greyish, poked out between collar and hat-brim. His eyes, grey as rain-water, moved about, alert and suspicious, like the eyes of a chameleon. They paused a ...”

“... perilously momentous realm of history.’ Northrop Frye regards the Bible as fiction because, like William Blake, from whom he derives his title, he comes near to identifying religion with creativity. To that extent he is an ally of Alter: but to him the focus of creativity is not in narrative but in myth; and myth is a construct – ‘it belongs to the world ...”

“... have become, too much aware of what might theoretically be made of contemporary social situations. William Trevor’s Felicia’s Journey should have been a very good novel but failed to be, because the author gave up his own involuntary and unconscious literary personality in favour of a plot that must have looked absolutely right – too right – for this ...”

“... problem is more acute with the American Constitution, a spare document many of whose clauses are broad statements of general principle, than with modern counterparts such as the lengthy and highly detailed new Constitution of South Africa, which seeks to anticipate almost every conceivable problem and circumstance that may arise in the ...”

“... walls and dig trenches, Blemish picks their pockets with villainous glee. And here we descend to broad and savage satire. The very names shade into allegory, including that of Esposito, which derives from the old custom of ‘exposing’ illegitimate babies on the steps of the church or at the door of the orphanage for adoption. Esposito is a bastard. But ...”

“... that includes ‘the entire spectrum of attempts to rectify historical injustices’. This is so broad a definition as to verge on meaninglessness. Nor does it help when restitution is referred to variously as a ‘beacon of morality’, ‘an adjudicator of national identity and ethnicity’, and ‘not merely a moral idea but a political and social ...”

“... The term ‘constitutional monarchy’ is bandied about as if it always meant the same thing. William of Orange was a constitutional monarch; so is Elizabeth II. The powers, rights, and obligations accruing to each are, of course, very different. Even written constitutions are subject to different interpretations at different times (as the extension of ...”

“... in the 19th, and stutters to a halt with the hanging of two Second World War collaborators, William Joyce (the despised Lord Haw-Haw, who was born in the United States, was brought up in Ireland and on the basis of long residence had acquired a British passport) and John Amery (scion of a High Tory family, who had moved to Germany after the outbreak of ...”

“... but to use their theories to leave the world a better place than they found it. Their leader is William MacAskill, a 28-year-old lecturer at Oxford. As graduate students MacAskill and his friend Toby Ord committed themselves to donate most of their future earnings to charity (in MacAskill’s case anything above £20,000, in Ord’s £18,000), and set ...”

“... after his death, do not disguise an essential seediness. It is noted by his first biographer, William Cooke, that he ‘took snuff in such quantities as often rendered him a very slovenly beau’. Variously called the ‘Hogarth of the stage’ and the ‘English Aristophanes’ – in both cases rather flatteringly – Foote included among his fans Dr ...”

“... their legs trussed with a farmer’s rope. Enjoying the sport are Englishmen in shirtsleeves and broad-brimmed hats, their grins set off by heavy moustaches. Schreiner’s husband, Samuel Cronwright, had found the photograph in the window of a barber shop in Kimberley, the diamond-mining town in the north of the Cape Colony. It had been taken in Southern ...”