“... and the poems, too, can be read as something like works of criticism. Many critics see ‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer’ as the earliest evidence of Keats’s genius, and the sonnet treats with Renaissance magnificence that peculiarly modern subject, the poet as reader of poetry. Or again, the remarkable fragment which, only two and a half ...”

“... of Discontent, the demoralisation of the Callaghan Government, its fall and electoral defeat, the first year of the Thatcher Government. They also cover the rise of Benn: not in the Government itself, where it is clear he was marginalised both by Callaghan and his own actions, but in the wider Labour movement. He calls Part Six of the book (May 1979-May ...”

“... stomach ‘gavotting and rumbling as I ran from the main terminal to the domestic one in Rome’. Ruth Reichl, one of the best of the recent food memoirists – she is the author of the trilogy Tender at the Bone, Comfort Me with Apples and Garlic and Sapphires – describes an uneaten airline meal as she flies from LA to New York on her way to take up a job ...”

“... that had been gaining influence in the wider culture for decades. Not long afterwards, Ruth Simmons, the president of Brown University, announced that her university would begin to reckon with its historical entanglement with slavery. That initiative inspired administrators at other institutions. In 2004 the University of Alabama issued a formal ...”

“... crosses and black candles, I don’t doubt that he would. In an epigraph over his preface – the first words in the book, effectively – he quotes an oblique little exchange from Waiting for Godot: Estragon: All the dead voices. Vladimir: To be dead is not enough for them. I suppose this must be meant as a nod to Elisabeth Hauptmann, Margarete ...”

“... affinity with the blood brotherhood’ of the thugs. While Merchant’s sometime collaborators (Ruth Prawer Jhabvala as well as James Ivory) seem to have winced when faced with the chief plot premise – that an upper-class Englishman could effortlessly pass himself off as a lower-class Indian – Merchant himself was convinced that this was ‘a matter of ...”

“... Robert Harris’s first novel, Fatherland (1992), was a counterfactual historical thriller set in Nazi Germany in 1964. In the alternative reality of the book, Germany defeated the Soviet Union in the Caucasus in 1943, lured the Royal Navy to its destruction after learning that the British had cracked the Enigma code, and intimidated the United States into signing a peace treaty by successfully testing an atom bomb and launching an intercontinental V3 rocket across the Atlantic ...”

“... psychology, to which he gave the name ‘functionalism’. I’ll try to explain that, but first a glance at what Putnam calls, when he soars, his ‘approach/avoidance’ relation to a family of large ideas. The thoughts which he wants to avoid, but which tug at him still, are (his list): The truth about the world is independent of what we think about ...”

“... on what has gone before. In ‘Out of the Fray’, an uneasy pre-marital visit to London ends with Ruth watching her husband-to-be asleep and thinking: ‘She understood that when he left her it would be like death and wondered when it happened how she would go on.’ In that sentence, the word ‘understood’ helps to make Mary Gordon seem to be endorsing an ...”

“... could now be heard emanating from the Kremlin. It’s true that apart from Zviad Gamsakhurdia, the first president of post-Soviet Georgia, no Soviet-era dissident came close to assuming power in the manner of Lech Walesa or Václav Havel. But several of them, including Sakharov (released from internal exile), Liudmila Alekseeva (returned from exile in the ...”

“... who wasn’t keen on wiping a suspect’s penis across a microscope slide. The Chicago kit was the first to be rolled out systematically. Goddard’s real innovation was not the kit itself, but the set procedure and the training that accompanied it, ensuring that samples were collected, labelled and tracked properly, and that victims were treated ...”

“... in Biblical studies which has made their work possible: Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis (1946). ‘The first chapters, comparing Old Testament narrative with Homeric narrative and meditating on the unique relation of ordinary-language realism to high “figural” meanings in the Gospels, not only offered new perspectives on the Bible but also suggested new ...”

“... is taking a beating these days. The assault began a few years ago with a blistering profile by Ruth Shalit in the New Republic. Shalit’s article, entitled ‘When We Were Philosopher Kings’, portrayed bioethicists as pompous blowhards who are widely ignored even as they insist on their own importance. One, remarking on the reception of his ethics ...”

“... Eight million horses​ perished in the First World War, along with untold numbers of donkeys and mules, just as the ascendency of the car made clear that the pervasiveness of the horse as a working animal was coming to an end. The disappearance of the horse from urban –and later rural – life didn’t happen overnight ...”

“... wish for. For the right, Thatcher’s victories in the 1980s show what can be done under a first-past-the-post system – and no doubt it was the prospect of a Thatcher-like landslide that drew May to her Waterloo. But getting out of Europe was hardly a precondition for the triumph of Thatcherism. Rather, it was getting into Europe that helped ...”