“... conventional answers to a common set of questions. Milton’s individual combination of doctrines may have been idiosyncratic, but if he was a sect of one, there were many sects of one in 17th-century England. His insistence on the supremacy of the individual conscience was a standard Protestant position, and the problems he took on in his late poems were ...”

“... subtitle, ‘The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng’, appears only on the title page). This may make sense from the point of view of publicity and sales – Eggers’s name sells books, and selling more books raises awareness of and more funds for the causes that matter most to Achak – but it also inspires unease: Achak ...”

“... they snivel, how they demand our attention and sympathy. Still riding on a wave of sentiment that may not have had much more energy left in it, the Princess of Wales timed her exit impeccably. It is tempting to think that Richard Branson also understood, if only unconsciously, that public adulation is likely to tire and turn into its own ...”

“... structure of government. These ‘empires’, as the Spanish called them, the Inca and the Aztec, may not have been quite the great barbarian civilisations that Cortés and Pizarro, always eager to overplay their own achievements in having conquered them, made them out to be. But they were quite unlike most of the loose, decentralised indigenous societies ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... wrecking the economy? It looked hopeless. In his fine book The Rise and Fall of Apartheid (2009), David Welsh asked: ‘How could two such opposed organisations as the ANC and the NP ever hope to reach a constitutional settlement, given their respective histories, their radically different constitutional proposals, and a serious difference of opinion over the ...”

“... to play fifty years ago) were also billed, alongside veterans from the founding festival: Santana, David Crosby, Country Joe McDonald, the remains of the Grateful Dead, Canned Heat and others. But Lang’s fifty-up began to unravel when his top-dog investor, the Japanese digicoms company Dentsu Aegis, announced from its London HQ that it was pulling ...”

“... 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 ...”