“... other’s eyes, just as you have seen the untamed things of the wild. Poor Little Woman! ... I took her by the shoulders and placed myself in front of her. With my right I forced the father back, while the left arm held off the son. ‘Enough of that,’ I said. ‘Listen to me. I’ll knock down the one who strikes first, without the slightest ...”

“... There are Lennonesque conceptual twisters: (There was a maid her   name was Jim they always took her   name for him). There is an epic which refuses the consolations of mythologising (‘News of Warring Clans’); a prose work which traces the route by which value thins out into exchange value (‘A Note on Metal’); and the deliciously funny and ...”

“... taxes on America, in the shape of the Townshend Acts of 1767 (to which other Americans like John Dickinson and Samuel Adams responded with ever more ingenious arguments like the right of Parliament to legislate for the colonies, as against tax them), Franklin wrote his son William ‘that no middle doctrine can be well maintained ... Something might be ...”

“... was the son of an architect who had learned his profession under the comfortably traditionalist John Nash, but his own vision, actuated by the ‘throb of possibility’ (lovely, phrase), was engaged with the architecture of the future as embodied in Fontaine’s designs. He was a practical idealist, and the heart of the novel is the fate of his dream. The ...”

“... to find too much going on’ there. The calm was disturbed by members of a new team assembled by John von Neumann, the legendary mathematician. Von Neumann too had spent much of the war at Los Alamos. There, he was gripped by a vision as remarkable as Charles Babbage’s a century before: perhaps one could build a machine to calculate. Von Neumann was ...”

“... poverty and racism here and now, not wait for the collapse of the global capitalist order.’ John Caputo argued along these lines in After the Death of God (2007): I would be perfectly happy if the far-left politicians in the United States were able to reform the system by providing universal healthcare, effectively redistributing wealth more equitably ...”

“... concepts of common sense together into a revolutionary package. From the Aberdeen ministers Paine took the idea that human nature itself led to belief in certain principles, and that the insights of ordinary people had more to recommend them than the lucubrations of over-educated philosophers. But he also insisted that ordinary people needed to be shaken out ...”

“... the Lame’). He came into the full light of history only in the 1360s. In 1366, he took control of Samarkand, the city that was to be his capital. In 1372, he invaded Khorezm. Other invasions followed: Moghulistan (1375-76), Khorasan (1381), Caspian territories (1382), Azerbaijan (1386), Asia Minor (1387), Russia (1390-91), Georgia ...”

“... familiar in Civil War hauntings as well). One who makes regular reappearances is the British spy John André, who was captured at Tarrytown and hanged at Tappan for his supposedly traitorous collaboration with Benedict Arnold. André was an attractive felon: even Americans called him ‘beautiful’, ‘manly’ and ‘noble’, and his charmed memory ...”

“... genial voice of Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1985). The narrator’s name is Silver, as in Long John. She lives with her mother in Salts, in the far north-west of Scotland near Cape Wrath: ‘cliff-perched, wind-cleft’, a ‘Fossil Town’, ‘salted and preserved by the sea that had destroyed it too’. When her mother falls to her death, Silver and her ...”

“... master of ceremonies, unwilling or unable to prevent himself interrupting the proceedings. As John Bayley put it a few years back, one primary object of a Barnes novel ‘is to dazzle and bemuse the reader throughout with the knowledge and reminder that this is a very clever young person writing a very clever and witty novel’. The most obvious ...”

“... Kungsholm, pride of neutral Sweden, was sold in mid-war to America, converted to trooping as the John Ericsson, then sold back after the war to her original owners. In a burst of postwar activity, before the jet age took over, the Americans made the running on the Atlantic. In 1952 the United States, ‘long believed ...”

“... the Whigs have often been dismissed as a party of frivolous aristocrats playing at politics, who took up various reforming causes only to drop them when they seriously threatened Whig interests. This is a rather harsh view, and one would expect Holland House to play a part in its refutation. For in a period when the landed aristocracy possessed vast ...”

“... all to impress his mate.) Some Facebook posters even worry about spontaneous combustion, which I took to be just another flex, until on the hottest day of 2022, a wildfire started in a dry heap in the village of Wennington on the edge of East London and burned down eighteen houses. Compost doesn’t need to be hot and very often it isn’t. High temperatures ...”

“... a preferred policy tool has long been recognised, and even celebrated in fiction, for example in John Le Carré’s The Little Drummer Girl (1983), which featured an Israeli spymaster’s devious and successful plot to kill a Palestinian terrorist. One operation in particular caught the popular imagination: the hunting down of the perpetrators of the ...”