“... mountains of glossy Australiana now on offer – the bookshops burst, the coffee-tables groan – may be less than obvious. The anthropologist Annette Hamilton, reviewing Australians to 1788, judges that excellent volume disappointing, not so much in what it says and shows of precontact Aboriginality, but in the limitation of its address to readers who are ...”

“... ask these things, of course. The tone is judicious, though an outburst of ritual name-calling from David Jordan belies the subtlety of his longer study, The Revolutionary Career of Maximilien Robespierre. For him, Robespierre is ‘unworldly, resentful, vain, egotistical, susceptible to flattery, contemptuous of or indifferent to all the social pleasures ...”

“... not of God but of anti-God.’ Such clear demonstrations of the inefficacy of state atheism may well prove that without God people act badly. Clearly, he is right about this totalitarian Godlessness. But his desire to absolve Nazism of any Christian involvement is inaccurate, and undermines his testcase. Did ecclesiastical anti-semitism have absolutely ...”

“... GALLEGOS, 18, disappeared 14 November 2011’; ‘MARISELA GONZALEZ VARGAS, 26, disappeared 26 May 2011’; ‘ESMERALDA CASTILLO RINCON, 14 – Help us find her.’ It’s pretty much always the same ones: dark-skinned, working-class girls from poor neighbourhoods, the morenitas as they’re called, factory workers or prostitutes, or both. Middle-class ...”

“... whom he might educate – he even wanted to preserve himself from errant fallings-in-love.’ She may have read her mother Mary’s letters from the time, in which she protested to Edward that she could not ‘for a moment agree … in thinking that any such communication should be made to dear Minnie so early. I really think it would be taking an unfair ...”

“... these bitter contests. Bork was a cutting-edge neo-conservative of the 1980s, but his successors may well go far beyond him, striking down laws protecting workers and the environment, supporting the destruction of basic civil liberties in the war on terrorism, and engaging in a wholesale attack on the premises of 20th-century constitutionalism. Or then ...”

“... would be the contemporary description. Alas, dignified mutism as a nation is compatible with and may even cause constant pandemonium at home. On that sounding-board of the national soul, the Edinburgh Scotsman’s letters page, I doubt if a week has passed since Scott’s time without its quota of resentful jibes about non-equality and Southern ...”

“... for Innovation, Universities and Skills in the summer of 2007. The detail of these changes may not be riveting, but what it signals about the reshaping of official attitudes towards higher education is striking. Universities and research have come more and more under the aegis of bodies whose primary concerns are business, trade and employment. The ...”

“... all directors’ cameras are cold anyway. Think of Bertolucci, say, in comparison with Buñuel. It may help to return to one or two of the images and associations I mentioned earlier. The striking thing about the tracking shots in Paths of Glory is that they are taken from two diametrically opposed angles. In the first set, the camera is our eye, or Kirk ...”

“... spring into sharper relief. Read both and then, suddenly, parts of Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, David, Matthew or Paul take on new life as provokers of laughter or suppliers of depth or authority. As time went by Rabelais deepened his sense of comedy and its problems. In Pantagruel and Gargantua he is aware of the cruelty of comedy but seems untroubled by ...”

“... machines cool enough to stop them breaking down. A paper in the energy research magazine Joule in May 2018 estimated that bitcoin mining globally was consuming at least 2.5 gigawatts, almost as much as the country of Ireland in its entirety, implying that each individual bitcoin transaction required, on average, between two hundred and three hundred kilowatt ...”

“... Kazuo Ishiguro, British in all but name, has not lived in Nagasaki since he was a toddler; David Mitchell left Hiroshima four years ago. There is a certain amount of unjustly neglected travel writing, such as the work of the late Alan Booth. But Japan has never attracted the attention of a Chatwin or a Naipaul, let alone fostered a Kipling, a Somerset ...”

“... years to spare, you can follow the internet discussions on what ‘quasi-subliminal’ images may or may not have been embedded by the film-makers, but when I was young I would always reliably see what was almost not there; when I was a student, earning a little money by being an experimental subject for trainee ...”

“... clubs and coffee-houses of London’s blossoming West End, and the perfect clownish counterfoil to David Garrick’s smouldering tragic hero. In his heyday in the 1760s, a summer season at the Haymarket theatre earned his company up to £5000, which may be multiplied a hundredfold for its value today. He had a townhouse on ...”

“... a lady flanked by two gentlemen, one older and one younger.’ Dickens, and more acutely Gogol, may have influenced Roth, but probably the strongest impression was made by Viennese journalism, in particular the practice and perfection of the feuilleton, or short literary article. Feuilletons were brief sketches, sometimes arguments but often exquisite ...”