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“... of religious consensus: the immanence of God, the efficacy of prayer, Christ’s divinity, the post-mortem survival of souls, the dichotomy of heaven and hell. But the more pre-modern people examined these concepts, the more they disagreed. Theologians disputed the meaning of ‘witch’, for instance – just one of many points of interpretative doubt in ...”

“... that all interpretation is necessarily misinterpretation (reduced by calmer exponents such as Jonathan Culler to the uncontentious assertion that no interpretation can ever be final), and the dashing new formulation of the old problem of intention – Ellis argues with force and clarity. Moreover he happens to believe that some writings are more complex ...”

“... see the folks who disapproved of her. It all gets a little desultory after that, partly because Jonathan Pryce has decided to play Perón as just a nice chap – a little reserved and distant, but certainly a gentleman compared with all of Evita’s other fellers. You also start thinking about the limits of the genre the movie belongs to: the pop ...”

“... able to distinguish a series of distinctive eras: the ‘First Peace Movement’ (1793-1816), the Jonathan Dymond era (1816-31), the Joseph Sturge era (1832-45), the Elihu Burritt era (1846-8) and finally the Richard Cobden era (1848-51), which he charts as being clearly pacificist rather than pacifist, albeit one in which pacifists still held an ‘honoured ...”

“... church at home is not healed by fixing its gaze on distant shores and the residual politics of post-imperial times ... England stands at a disadvantage as compared with other components of the United Kingdom – with Scotland, Wales, even Ulster, though this is a more dubious case. I prefer England to the late Empire and I should like it to ...”

“... decided not to oppose the Tories on the basic tenets of their austerity policies: she knew that a post-2015 Labour government would have done the same. The Labour Party that lost the election was conformist and visionless: it had forgotten what it meant to mount an opposition. The new system for Labour leadership elections that Miliband introduced in 2014 was ...”

“... place, but we travel much further back and forwards in time, from the industrial revolution, to post-9/11, to a moment pitched 150 years into the future when New York is peopled by interstellar visitors and by clones. The form of haunting has become at once more elliptical and more intense: we know the characters in each story are connected, but these ...”

“... Mahler, has edited a new one, The Mahler Companion. Two other biographies, by Peter Franklin and Jonathan Carr, have recently appeared. And, of course, there are recordings – well over a thousand versions of twenty works. A Mahler Discography, published in 1995, is already thoroughly out of date. One starts to wonder: is there such a thing as too much ...”

“... culture which the government plans to start importing from America: the ‘student experience’. Jonathan Cole, former provost and dean of faculties at Columbia, wrote in the Huffington Post last year that in addition to fee inflation, a major contributor to the increased cost of higher education in America stems from the ...”

“... desire of the principal Beats for a lick at the American dream of the Fifties – Saturday Evening Post family, house, plot of land – remained under-described, overwhelmed by hallucinatory excesses and the tyranny of now. Carolyn endures the continuing pain of accurately curating her own life, checking catalogues and proofs, a torrent of yellow Jiffy ...”

“... the most aggressive espionage operations against the US of any ally’. In addition to the case of Jonathan Pollard, who gave Israel large quantities of classified material in the early 1980s (which it reportedly passed on to the Soviet Union in return for more exit visas for Soviet Jews), a new controversy erupted in 2004 when it was revealed that a key ...”

“... carried the torch at midnight. The most celebrated (and photographed) visitors to I Tatti in the post-war period included such marginal representatives of the Civilised Life as Harry S. Truman, Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy (whose presence was, BB felt, ‘life-enhancing’), and, most improbable of all, Ernest Hemingway. Meryle Secrest discloses that Hemingway ...”

“... leadership contest, he saw a copy of Heseltine’s latest book on the coffee table, stuffed with post-it notes. She told him she had been marking up what she called ‘all the socialist references’.Thatcher could at least rest assured that Major was none of these things: he was not a flouncer; he was not a Euro-federalist; and he was not a closet ...”

“... who knew much too much to be left alone? Far worse was to follow for Wallace. He at last gained a post as information officer for Arun District Council in Sussex, for whom he worked with his customary zeal and success. In various small ways he continued to be the subject of official harassment and surveillance, but in April 1980 he finally consented to be an ...”

“... off-the-record briefings, the supplanting of Brownite X with Blairite Y in the fifth most senior post at the Department of Trade and Industry and anonymous accusations from 10 Downing Street of lunacy in Number 11 – while knowing all along that the Chancellor’s camp had a secret which might ruin him. ‘There’s a thermonuclear bomb ticking underneath ...”