“... of stories, released on the same label, did not require a pundit to explain how a deaf ex-addict rock musician brought back the goods from his twenty-year nightmare of fame and lunacy. A chess-playing wino? That’s another ball-game. The story, in truth, tells itself. Healy’s methods are basically conversational – with a narrative drive that is apparent ...”

“... schools. In their collection of essays on 12th-century Latin, The Tongue of the Fathers (1998), David Townsend and Andrew Taylor confirmed Ong’s insight. Latin discourse, they wrote, ‘endlessly replicates tradition. It upholds a monological and orthodox consensus … To enter into this language is, par excellence, to enter into patriarchy. Medieval ...”

“... multisensory experience, with music, dance, costumes and special effects – more like a rock concert than the Royal Court. Isabelle Torrance insists on tragic drama’s deep religious roots. The word tragedy means ‘goat song’, and although we don’t know exactly why, it probably alludes to the drama’s ritual, even sacrificial origins. Robert ...”

“... demonstrations again? Could their growing list of struggles ever cause them seriously to rock the boat? As they come of age, will they steer China in the direction of serious democratic reform, or will they carry on in the Leninist tradition?’ I don’t think millennials have either the drive or the incentive to take action: unlike former ...”

“... His vice was not exclusiveness but a desperate desire that everybody pull together and not rock the boat. A gnawing sense of the worthlessness of worldly success is the starting-point for the adventures. To the Sixties, all this was incomprehensible. John Buchan was either ‘a very odd fish indeed’, as Simon Raven thought, or at least preposterous ...”

“... in a ‘History of Civilisation’ series, in which it joins such works as Charles Burney and David Marshall Lang’s The People of the Hills: Ancient Ararat and Caucasus (1971) and George Lichtheim’s Europe in the 20th Century (1972). Indeed, the back of Lichtheim’s book announced Lewis’s work as forthcoming, though it then bore the title The ...”

“... invigorated, instruction diffused, public burthens lightened, economy seated as it were upon a rock, the gordian knot of the poor laws not cut but untied – all by a simple idea in architecture’ Not just prisons but schools, madhouses, hospitals, reformatories and workhouses – all were erected in the sanguine faith that for every problem there was an ...”

“... of Samuel: estrangement from the prophet leaves Saul with black moods that are only relieved by David’s lyre. But music for Jones’s characters is rarely restorative. Their Vietnam War is not fought against a mythic soundtrack of rock and roll. Only in desperation can the soldier coming to the end of 30 days’ mess ...”

“... opinions married to a successful businessman. (Florence’s mother has been a friend of Elizabeth David and is a friend of Iris Murdoch.) Both stories are set at a very precise date, with debates about socialism, Britain’s decline as a world power, and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Both works exude a sense, alive in McEwan’s work since The Child ...”

“... I made another personal discovery: Stuart’s mother was descended, through her mother, from John Rock Grosset, a pro-slavery Tory MP who owned a plantation in Portland. Further questions arose. What, beyond simple economic interest, turned people into active pro-slavers? What were they afraid of? How did they hope to stem the tide of abolitionism? How should ...”

“... that politics sometimes enters into politics. He says he was reluctant to nationalise Northern Rock because it would have meant a very bad deal for the British taxpayer. He doesn’t admit that he was terrified of anything that might look like a reversion to the bad old days of socialism. When he agreed before the 2010 election to take part in the ...”

“... You​ ought to be in a kindergarten,’ a Canadian nurse exclaimed to David Jones, aged twenty, awaiting transfer home in July 1916 after being wounded in Mametz Wood. Even a decade later, photographs show a wary child or an understudy for an adult. Prudence Pelham, the staunchest of his extended female fellowship, described him as ‘completely unsexed ...”

“... of the New World, re-creates Mehta’s years at the Arkansas School of the Blind in Little Rock, which he attended from 1949 to 1952. If Vedi is the most closely focused and harrowing of the books in the series, Sound-Shadows is in many ways the most haunting, because it shows us most clearly how the author learned to manage both the fact and the idea ...”

“... had built her own Shakespearean shrine-cum-reading-room in 1742 – more than a decade before David Garrick commissioned what had previously been considered the first Temple of Shakespeare, complete with a statue by Roubiliac, for his own garden at Hampton – made me sufficiently curious to want to renew my attempt to see her former house and ...”

“... ruins; but how insignificant are the greatest of these’ compared to what had been built by ‘rock-making Polypi’. There was a paradox here too. Coral atolls are found in deep waters in the open ocean, yet the corals that compose them are shallow-water organisms. How did they form? Some writers speculated that they were little crowns on top of volcanoes ...”