“... regarded as detritus. Dispersal has cut them off not only from the past, but from the future. They may have some way to go, as detritus, but since the island doesn’t boast a recycling plant, they will remain for the duration what they already are. They constitute the stuff of death rather than the stuff of life. Narrative keeps fresh the capacity for memory ...”

“... those who distrust government intervention and those who demand it. The effects of this crisis may yet end up being more severe than those of the last great crisis we faced, to which this one is often compared, the financial meltdown of 2008. But there is a similarity: then, as much as now, responses to the policy challenges were shaped by political ...”

“... failures on the machinations of Jews. As Luzzatto suggests, Morès’s antisemitic fervour may have been rooted in these humiliations, and in another, when his first choice of wife – Louise Fould, a wealthy Jewish heiress – rejected his advances.Could​ Morès be a distant forerunner of Donald Trump, another adept of provocation in new ...”

“... of India’ or ‘an Indo-Aryan language’. One of the more scholarly sites speculates that it may indeed be more than one language, because its significant dia-lect variations have not yet been thoroughly analysed. Ghosh’s separation of Bhojpuri from Hindustani has a polemical aspect, and sets it apart as a ‘minority’ language at one remove from the ...”

“... The difference between the Girard-Cadière case and the sexual abuse scandals of our own day, it may seem, is no more than a matter of media technology. Yet the trial itself turned on Cadière’s claims to have experienced miracles, visions and divine possession, and involved testimony obtained during an exorcism. Both Cadière and Girard were accused of ...”

“... line of communication’ (stärkster Verbindung) with the castle. The wrong destination may, after all, be the right one; and in another sense, too, since K. falls asleep and dreams that he is wrestling with a naked castle official who resembles a Greek god. It’s all to no avail. The next morning, Bürgel can’t wait to get rid of him, and he is ...”

“... but realists and pragmatists . . . Illusions,’ she continues, ‘are built on nothing: hopes may have real foundations, however fragile or temporary. This was the case with the postwar decade.’ All the same, she endorses many of the criticisms levelled at the agreement, and particularly those directed against the British. Holding the balance between ...”

“... images of ruin have come equally well from other origins (Great War, civil war, revolution) and may this not be more relevant, since the broken bridge and the cleft hill don’t belong at all to what was done to the crofting townships by the lairds’ thugs, nor do tiles, glass or china, none of which were in use there? But usually Marshall is relevant and ...”

“... recognised. At their peak in the 1650s his almanacs sold up to 30,000 copies a year. From them he may only have netted a modest £70 a year (enough for a gentleman to live on), but they served to advertise his astrological practice, from which we have the surviving records of many thousands of consultations. Lilly advised the rich, famous and powerful; among ...”

“... universe. Yet they were also very different men. Haber’s pragmatic conversion to Protestantism may have been unusual, but in other respects he was the model of an assimilated middle-class Jew. Like the subjects of two shorter essays here – the immunologist Paul Ehrlich (inventor of chemotherapy) and the physicist Max Planck – Haber embraced German ...”

“... Vikram Seth’s The Golden Gate, which are not quite prepared to admit to being long poems. But it may be too broad. Forster explicitly includes, alongside Emma and the rest of the Great Tradition, texts as unlike each other, and as unlike Emma, as Pilgrim’s Progress and W.H. Hudson’s Green Mansions. No one’s arguing about Emma. But Pilgrim’s Progress ...”

“... and become an air-traffic control assistant, but he is worried about a medical report which may prove him to be tubercular. The dust-cover biography of Alan Sillitoe suggests that the story may be partly autobiographical. The second section, a quarter of the length, gives us Paul Morton (in the third person, no longer ...”

“... gave him some problems after the war. He was denied a visa to enter the United States in May 1955, at the height of the anti-Communist hysteria. (The public rebuke came just as Oppenheimer was being interrogated by the Atomic Energy Commission’s personnel security board, although Oppenheimer’s case was secret at the time.) Nearly two decades ...”

“... declared, people would undoubtedly address a boy wearing such a jacket as ‘Buttons’. He may well have been thinking of Buttons the page in the pantomime version of Cinderella. In America, too, the pages or ‘call boys’ whose instant availability was crucial to the smooth functioning of office block, luxury hotel and legislative chamber alike ...”

“... man, less cocksure and more wary, wanting to do some good and make a difference, but afraid it may be too late. The Friends of Harry Perkins traces his rise from the backbenches to the brink of Downing Street. The time frame for this is deliberately confusing. As Mullin tells us in his preface, the new book is set in a future that overlaps with the recent ...”