“... but her mother taught her Spanish, and gave her Castilian books to read. She could also understand French and Italian.Portugal had been ruled by Spain since 1580, and yanked into the Habsburg empire, which imposed heavy taxes to fund its wars. The Braganzas had a claim to the throne and, in 1640, João was urged to accept the crown. He was persuaded, so the ...”

“... the snick and swing of tense shift could get away with the opening of the 1993 story ‘Comet’: Philip married Adele on a day in June. It was cloudy and the wind was blowing. Later the sun came out. It had been a while since Adele had married and she wore white. It is the most radical economy to convey a life encompassing two marriages by repeating the ...”

“... lengthy biographies in English. Jung Chang and Jon Halliday’s is the longest, having overtaken Philip Short’s Mao (1999) and Li Zhisui’s The Private Life of Chairman Mao (1995). It represents an extraordinary research effort. The authors have been working on the project since at least 1986, to judge by the date of the earliest interview cited, which ...”

“... the work’s true individuality. This consists to a very large extent in the dégustation, as the French say, of boredom: excruciating, fascinating, endless banality, interspersed – not varied – with a pathos so homely and total that it brings tears to the eyes. Beckett and Pinter have nothing on Patrick Hamilton at his best: in fact, beside him they seem ...”

“... from home? When national stereotypes are contradicted, nobody knows what to say. If he were French or from a Latin country the papers would be full of stuff about his being detached, laid-back, shruggy. As it is, they reach for the received-opinion file – which doesn’t have anything in it about the not at all rare phenomenon of the New Age German ...”

“... various bodily functions, and re-places Oe squarely in the existential tradition, to which, as a French scholar, he remains indebted (Japanese critics, however, also make much of his American-style narratives, including the ‘Americanisms’ of his Japanese). If he is not exactly a realist, he is not really a Modernist either (despite the fireworks of his ...”

“... is something a little too on the nose about biblical literalists building an ark. Yet as Philip Almond recounts in his new book, the same questions that preoccupy the evangelicals who visit the Ark Encounter have troubled Jews, Christians and Muslims for millennia. Almond argues that we underestimate the importance of Noah’s story. To ...”

“... with the other five shortlistees, appeared on the front page of the Times. My parents were French teachers, and though my father knew far more about French literature than his wife, it was she who picked up the phone and used phrases I thought I would never hear issue from her mouth. When she had finished, she ...”

“... a tailor, a lacemaker, a potter and a jeweller all died better off than the royals they served. Philip Rundell, diamond jeweller by appointment, was a millionaire. The personal assets of Queen Charlotte, his most important customer, were valued at £140,000 – diamonds, presumably, included. Some magnates with the Midas touch ...”

“... Germany and isolating it further. Most European states remained Catholic: to their rulers, notably Philip II of Spain, the English were anti-Christian and their queen a heretic. She spent the last 18 years of her reign fighting the Spanish, emptying the royal war chest and becoming increasingly dependent on the rich merchants who topped it up again. Driven by ...”

“... a counterlife, with fiction and fact constantly ducking and weaving around each other. As in Philip Roth’s novel of that name, moments that look like intimate revelations are shown to be virtuoso displays of formalist trickery, and vice versa. For the first sixty or so pages it is possible to read Arabesques as an intelligently contemporary attempt at ...”

“... narrator’s story begins a few years later, in medias res, at Frankenhausen on 15 May 1525, when Philip of Hesse’s mercenaries crushed the peasants led by Müntzer in one of the last battles of the German Peasants’ War. Müntzer was captured, tortured – confessing his heretical belief that ‘omnia sunt communia,’ ‘everything belongs to ...”

“... the Blutrinne. Müntzer was captured and, after a fiery exchange of scriptural justifications with Philip of Hesse, tortured and executed.By June the peasants had all but lost in Franconia, Swabia and Alsace. Then the Swabian League scattered five thousand rebels near Würzburg, ending the war and commencing an orgy of mopping-up and retribution that ...”

“... been but few occasions when the whole company of Angry Young Men was assembled. Kingsley Amis, Philip Larkin and John Wain knew one another at Oxford, but had little to do with autodidacts like Colin Wilson, John Osborne and Alan Sillitoe – this last name less often mentioned in this context than might have been expected, doubtless because Saturday Night ...”

“... the opportunities that beckoned in this part of the world. British readers may be familiar with Philip, Sybil and Siegfried, but it was the crippled war veteran Victor (1881-1961) who chose to make a new life for himself in India and then Shanghai. Here, he invested in property, built the legendary Cathay Hotel – bigger, glitzier, more modern than the ...”