“... Murdoch’s descriptive prose: ‘A memory came back to her from her Italian journey, the young David of Donatello, casual, powerful, superbly naked, and charmingly immature.’ And no one could read more than a couple of her novels without recognising that they usually take place in summer, often in a large house, and rarely shift their gaze significantly ...”

“... as many constraints and fewer comforts. The hoped for careers rarely developed. The bohemian man may have idealised women as muses and models but he was unhampered by bourgeois obligations to be faithful or to earn money, though rarely was he so unconventional as to undertake any housework or childcare. The bohemian woman with children was as much shackled ...”

“... might have issued from Christ’s breast.The consummation imagined here is tellingly related in David Kennedy’s astute essay on Prince’s ‘Portrayal of National Bodies’ to a notebook entry the poet made in 1950, which details a bored church elder haunted by a ‘dream of naked man, opening his arms, receiving love and death upon his bare ...”

“... and interactivity, which are used as plot points and even as formal constraints (this began with David Foster Wallace’s conception of the maddening video called ‘the entertainment’ in Infinite Jest). Live news segments are pivotal set pieces in Such a Fun Age, and the video of Emira at the grocery store sets the story going. It’s funny that this is ...”

“... alchemy or his interests in astrology, numerology and biblical prophecy. Whatever madness may have crept into his method (possibly a result of mercury poisoning), natural philosophy had different boundaries to modern science, encompassing – or porous to – the supernatural. The alchemical papers at King’s have produced several books, most ...”

“... required that the actual source of motive power be obscured. Fressoz acknowledges his debt to David Edgerton, who argued in The Shock of the Old (2006) that we do not understand modernity because of our fixation on innovation and our lack of interest in the way systems of production operate. Accounts of contemporary reality organised around technological ...”

“... accounting for between 60 and 65 per cent of the peninsula’s urban population. While they may have converted out of fear for their lives, many New Christians were eager to integrate into mainstream Christian society. They joined religious orders, sponsored family chapels in churches and cathedrals, and married Old Christians. Some sought additional ...”

“... approved of the Falklands War and one begins to see that for all her goodness and mild appeal she may have trod the same path as her contemporaries Amis and Larkin. Masked though she was in kindliness and general benevolence she may have ended up as far from her radical beginnings as they did, Dame Iris’s spiritual ...”

“... that his preferences and impatiences seldom disturb any reader not out for a quarrel. We may doubt on principle that Isaac Babel’s Red Cavalry (1926) could be ‘completely objective’ in its depictions, but our guide’s belief in the validity of a neutral authorial stance allows him to get close to a practical transparency – not a bad trait ...”

“... and reach a more balanced view about how central it has been within its traditions. This may well entail re-assessing Gaitskell’s attack on Clause 4 after the Party’s defeat in 1959. Morgan dismisses this initiative as ‘a victory for abstract logic over common sense’ on the ground that ‘Labour did not intend, and never had intended, to ...”

“... Margaret is mourning only for herself; just that she is mourning for herself, whatever else she may be mourning for as well, and however deep or shallow that mourning may be. We are always the subject of our own tears, but not the only subject; and knowing the many other reasons why we weep is a complicated affair, often ...”

“... on the plain wall behind them, which parallels the line of eye contact. Even the unsententious may be inclined to feel that some smart adage about blind youth is neatly embodied here, but Bersani and Dutoit argue that Caravaggio’s paintings provide ‘a visual speculation on the meaning and condition of knowledge’ and that this clever robber is ...”

“... hub of the Scottish Folk Revival’. Instead, he seeks to establish him as a ‘genius’ who may have embraced whisky as a kind of sacrament. ‘It may well be,’ he said in the long obituary he wrote for the Guardian at the time of Henderson’s death in March 2002, ‘that the new Scotland – with its ...”

“... in the army. He was sent to France in November 1917 and invalided home with a shell wound in May 1918. His undergraduate career began in earnest in January 1919. During his training, Lewis had developed a close friendship with another fresh-faced future subaltern, Paddy Moore. Lewis’s relationship with Jane Moore, Paddy’s mother, was to be arguably ...”

“... did he or didn’t he?’ Of course, not everything has to be footnoted, and truth may come from invention as well. One of the most vivid Anglo-versions of French social history was Robert Baldick’s Dinner at Magny’s (1971), in which everything that was spoken by the famous literary diners was a true quote, while the context and narrative ...”