“... of their own courtrooms. All judges are aware that any decision deemed adverse to the government may end their careers. The scale of the social transformation being wrought by these measures exceeds even the founding convulsions of the republic. To appreciate what has happened in Turkey requires historical perspective, not least because the government is ...”

“... of young men in felt hats and starched collars walking along a country road, which Sander took in May 1914. Graham Swift is another novelist who, like Powers, is burdened by history, and for whom the central theme of modern life is our own historical self-consciousness. The 20th century, for these writers, is the historical century par excellence. The ...”

“... the painting in 1906, what they bought was The Woman in the Green Dress. The woman in the picture may still have resembled Camille, but she had become, in Monet’s words, ‘merely a Parisian figure of that time’. Such vanishing acts are hardly unusual in the history of painting. ‘I had not the least desire my model should be discoverable in my ...”

“... side or not. Anyone hoping for a comprehensive reappraisal of the 17th-century literary canon may be disappointed, too. According to Kerrigan, the historicising tendency in recent literary scholarship ‘has opened up issues that cannot be probed in other ways and equipped us more fully to make judgments about the value of texts’. Such judgments are ...”

“... level, to contain and control the vivid, traumatic happenings that originate their plots. They may be about secrets but they are themselves highly secretive. McEwan is addicted to the withholding of narrative information, the hoarding of surprises, the deferral of revelations; this manipulation of secrecy, apart from its obvious desire to keep the reader ...”

“... before the king, and let her cherish him, and let her lie in thy bosom, that my lord the king may get heat. Her name was Abishag. She was of the tribe of Issachar, from the village of Shunem, and, for that reason, was known as a Shunammite. The writer of the Book of Kings is at pains to tell us that David did not, so to speak, ‘have sexual relations ...”

“... Inspired provocateurs during May 1968 in Paris, the Situationists are now the stuff of legend: one of those rare avant-gardes whose art and politics were not only radical but also forged together in radical fashion. Yet, as these early letters of the young Guy Debord, the leader of the group, make clear, they were the stuff of legend from the start ...”

“... with the solipsism and literary penis-wagging of Updike’s generation of privileged males. Updike may have been praised for his missionary work on behalf of the Sexual Revolution in Couples, Marry Me and other tales from the commuter line, but the generation that followed were the children of divorce – the collateral damage of those adulterous games of ...”

“... Gloucestershire hospital: ‘when the money ran out’, according to one of her nephews, though it may also have had something to do with the creation of the NHS. My great-uncle remembered visiting her once in the late 1940s: the ward was large and crowded, he recalled half a century later, a ‘thoroughly wretched’ place. ‘Lying in bed, she stared up at ...”

“... for being so slow; the boy was only 19. Iris had been hiding in plain sight. Black’s emotions may have been, in the circumstances, quite strong. He was a man trained to listen, but not to this. Iris may have talked this way to everyone – religious people can be so intense – but it is possible that not all of them ...”

“... Unsurprisingly, some finessing of the notion of blame often takes place here: the possessed addict may have chosen a lifestyle that lends itself to possession – he may have hung around with unsavoury people, made a variety of unwise choices and so on. But the basic point remains: he was taken by his addiction, he didn’t ...”

“... notably a shot of him inside a cot with the two children, happiness scarcely threatened. She may also mean to glance at what Robert Zaretsky in his critical study calls Camus’s ‘serial infidelities’ and Alain Vircondelet in his new biography refers to as ‘donjuanisme’; but if so this is her only glance, apart from a mention of Camus’s ...”

“... considering the question, ‘What is an author?’ The two, needless to say, never met. Foucault may have visited Texas on one of his lecture tours, but Junior, as far as it is known, never took his S&M revelry beyond the Ivy League – novelists will have to invent a chance encounter in a basement club in Austin. Moreover, Junior’s general ignorance of ...”

“... question, once the northwest passage is open). Some of the effects that an open Arctic Ocean may have on international relations, energy security and global trade are explored in The Future History of the Arctic by Charles Emmerson.* But the idea that a thawing Arctic is something to be afraid of would have baffled our ancestors. For the men who sailed ...”

“... on a book spine refers to what is inside the volume’. He pursues the speculation further: ‘We may have here an early hint of an important component of religious thought: immanence. Gods and supernatural powers can be inside statues, mountains, lakes, seas, nature itself, and of course people.’ We also have here – though the fact does not concern ...”