“... It’s a good time to be a Muslim writing about ‘the trouble with Islam’, to borrow the title of a recent jeremiad by Irshad Manji, a Pakistani-Canadian lesbian feminist. Readers in the West, especially Americans, are eager to know ‘what went wrong with Islam’, as Bernard Lewis delicately puts it, particularly if it can be traced to cultural pathology and envy of ‘our freedom ...”

“... which matched a simultaneous explosion of applied science. In his youth, Marx was obsessed by the rapid spread of railways along the Rhine valley. Much later, one of the few subjects allowed to distract him from Das Kapital was the development of electricity, which he rightly saw as the precondition of great social transformations. Much ...”

“... In a famous poem by Hopkins, a child called Margaret is rebuked for grieving over the fall of leaves. Leaves fall; stuff happens; we get over it; or, to stay with Hopkins’s idiom, the heart ‘will come to such sights colder/By and by’. The child will one day find better reasons for her tears, including the fate of humankind, falling and falling again since its first lapse in Eden: ‘You will weep and know why ...”

“... of an Historian’ (1949) is as the title suggests both narrow and concise. The sketch by a pupil, J.H. Plumb, published in 1951, is a survey of the books rather than the man. Mrs Moorman, herself the biographer of Wordsworth as well as a loyal daughter, rightly considers this is not enough, and has retrieved letters, chiefly early and chiefly to ...”

“... in 1645-8, and that many ‘Presbyterians’ sat in the Rump of the Long Parliament, which used to be described as ‘Independent’. To upset so many apple-carts in so short a space must have given him great pleasure: since his article no responsible historian has ever dared to use the labels ‘Presbyterian’ and ‘Independent’ in the old carefree ...”

“... of the 19th century found their intellectual claims to the territory of nature weakened by several scientific developments. The most important development concerned the language of science. The specialists who were now writing about natural science increasingly refined their terms in order to build a literary structure of professional ...”

“... it disrupts standard novelistic workings just the same. Plot can more or less evaporate, replaced by less strident patterns of significance. What happens in Ulysses? Even if you accept Hugh Kenner’s explanation for the unfamiliar arrangement of furniture that causes Bloom to stumble as he climbs in through the window of 7 Eccles Street – that Molly ...”

“... like a scab? Teresa of Avila, a chilly forehead and a warm thigh, or St Simeon, being written by the tip of his stylus? You may prefer Marguerite Porete, burning alive with her book, or the rich black intersection of St John of the Cross or the pyroclastic whisper of Anonymous, Unknown Author. Or something a little closer to home – Jeannie, for ...”

“... away. Nobody knew how to get to Margaret Shaft, which is roughly twenty kilometres away, and, by now, most of the men were too weak to go very far. A few did set out to look for the shaft but returned saying they had encountered ‘a huge body of water’. They couldn’t tell how deep it was and suspected the water might ...”

“... he travelled to Rome to become an angel. It was 1487. Christendom’s most important priests would be there; the cleverest theologians would debate him. The pope would watch. Pico was going to dazzle them all. He planned to begin with a poetic, densely allusive speech, which almost no one would understand; then he would make nine hundred pronouncements, each ...”

“... secretary sits at the desk. I shift in my seat and the leather upholstery makes a sound that could be mistaken for a fart. I therefore shift in my seat again, two or three times, making the same sound deliberately in order to demonstrate that I have not inadvertently farted. The secretary looks up inquiringly. She may just ...”

“... to see English Literature replaced as a core subject in our school and university curriculum by the study of Culture and of Communications. Raymond Williams was already in mid-career, an established author and a Cambridge don, when the British Left entered its intellectual Renaissance in the 1960s. The New Left is academic, metropolitan and ...”

“... that is, on descriptions of the occupants of a local unit on a specific date, usually by household. Who is resident at any moment in a household depends on traditions of family structure, on birth, marriage and death rates, on the employment prospects of the inmates, or the needs of the family occupation, and sometimes on the active pressure of ...”

“... apportioning his property and specifying arrangements for his interment. He stipulated that he be buried ‘as privately as possible, and at Twelve o’clock at Night’ in the great aisle of Dublin’s St Patrick’s Cathedral, where he had been Dean since 1714. A tablet of black marble was to be fixed to the wall ...”

“... Suicide was thought damnable in the Middle ages, and I expect there are those who will be brought to feel by the first of these books that the Middle Ages had a point. The Monument commemorates a young couple who lived together for 17 years in a solitude à deux and who then took their own lives – incompetently and lingeringly ...”