“... the day’s failures will always outweigh its successes. Ruth was born in Gracefield, Michigan, a Christian commune run by the Brotherhood, a fictional Anabaptist sect with settlements across North America. Like the Amish and Mennonites, its members wear plain garments and keep their faces bare, in a ‘constantly recalibrating state of voluntary ...”

“... absorbed into the general collection, and they weren’t having that, so the coffin was sold to William Randolph Hearst for £72. Ingram by this time was long dead. On a hunting trip in Somaliland with Lady Meux’s husband in 1888, he was, as Kipling relayed to Haggard, gored and trampled to death by an elephant he’d wounded but failed to kill when he ...”

“... of Gustave Doré in London, his 1872 series of engravings, and the scenes of proletarian life by William Small and Frank Holl – the kind of work that Van Gogh was struggling to imitate around the time he turned thirty – that stand as formidable if unamiable exemplars of narrative force. I couldn’t achieve any liking for a prissily portentous symbolical ...”

“... agree where Mr Tracey writes about things which I experienced. His disparaging description of Sir William Haley as the curator of outmoded ideas and conventions obscures the fact that it was Haley who introduced the Home, Light and Third Programmes, ending the programmatic paternalism bequeathed by Reith. Shy and aloof from the staff in general though he ...”

“... Kenya’s​ government is in crisis. In May, President William Ruto introduced a controversial new finance bill, which proposed higher duties on basic goods such as bread, vegetable oil and sugar, as well as an ‘eco-levy’ that would drive up the cost of sanitary towels and other items. Ruto said the taxes would raise a much needed additional £2 billion in government revenues ...”

“... characters are Westerners in origin. The theme of the clash of cultures and the implicit anti-Christian animus have given way to a more introspective study of a renegade. Too little credit for services to literature is commonly given to Byron’s incompatible wife, Annabella Milbanke. Without her, he would have retained his place in London society, and ...”

“... by them. Which recalls Auden’s inversion in ‘Epitaph on a Tyrant’ of Motley’s epitaph on William the Silent: ‘When he cried, the little children died in the streets.’ Edmund Burke was accused by Mary Wollstonecraft and Tom Paine of putting it on in his lament for Marie Antoinette, but Burke protested that he had wept as he wrote and that the ...”

“... the supernatural. The alchemical papers at King’s have produced several books, most recently William R. Newman’s Newton the Alchemist (2018). All promote the idea that alchemy and science were, in their own time, inseparable, and that rationalism and occultism were very far from vying for each other’s extinction and the esteem of posterity.Outside ...”

“... house behind the Tower of London down Seething Lane. They were to visit one of Sam’s superiors, William Batten, surveyor of the navy. The custom was that women should take the first man they saw as their Valentine, so long as he was no relation. The previous year, Elizabeth had selected her own beau; this time it was all planned to further Sam’s new ...”

“... to photographic accuracy or, as it seemed to Dante Gabriel Rossetti, literalism; he complained to William Bell Scott that most of the Academy pictures that year were ‘done in prose’. But this was what the general art-viewing public of the mid-Victorian years liked, a picture with a story they could follow and explain to one another. Not that it had to be ...”

“... occur, but schoolmasters and headmasters abound: not just raffish Etonian schoolmasters such as William Cory Johnson and Oscar Browning, but solid, sober headmasters in the High Victorian style, such as Montagu Butler and J.E.C. Welldon at Harrow, afforced by Kennedy at Shrewsbury, Farrar at Marlborough, and Young at Sherborne. Lubenow is interested in a ...”

“... that she had been unfaithful to Cleary, who was often away at Clonmel. One possible lover was William Simpson, a man hated by many locals because he worked as a ‘heavy’ for the landlord. Bridget, always a defiant individualist, did his shopping when local grocers refused to serve him. (This may have helped the couple to secure the house from the ...”

“... by kicking on the floor. He knows them to be committed Christians, as he is. ‘Hear me, Christian neighbours!’ he thinks. ‘Hear your brother just above!’ But ‘no one is listening. No one is waiting to hear the kicking of a man above. It is unexpected. You have no ears for someone like me.’ The Christians downstairs are the imagined ...”

“... in Arabia but in Libya, and two centuries too early, but no matter: Muhammad was a foil for the Christian preoccupations of the day, heresy foremost among them. Muhammad, in the European imagination, was a repository of heresies: like Arius or Eunomius he thought Christ wasn’t as great as God; like Sabellius, he rejected the trinity; he was polygamous ...”

“... Dante’s work the ideal challenge to historicist thinking, and we might say the same about the Christian tradition of figural connection as Auerbach sees it. These ways of making sense of the world are powerfully alien to us and that is why we need to understand them, especially because we tend to think of them as abstract or ideological or ...”