“... been plenty for evangelicals to complain about even since the triumphs of Bush and Karl Rove. As Thomas Frank argued in 2004 in his book What’s the Matter with Kansas?, the striking thing about the Republican alliance with evangelicals has been the thinness of their legislative achievements: abortion is still legal, campaigners for gay rights have made ...”

“... Gaza for Sabbatai Sevi, the innumerable éminences grises throughout history, if not, indeed, the powers behind the thrones. Nahman is not exactly an éminence grise, but he does bear witness to Jacob’s Messianic awakening: ‘When I look at him, I see that there are people who are born with something that I cannot find the words for, something that means ...”

“... audience is a daunting prospect and few people have tried; the most successful, until now, was Thomas Keneally, whose novel Towards Asmara (1989), set in the guerrilla-held areas at the time of the liberation war, was a picaresque homage to the Eritrean people. Michela Wrong has attempted something different: an idiosyncratic, free-ranging history of ...”

“... beings who understand the implications of nuclear warfare. It is only among the non-nuclear minor powers that war may appeal as a rational way of obtaining one’s ends. On the other hand, his prose style is dialectical and reflects the clash of thesis and antithesis in human affairs: as with Oakeshott’s writings, the meaning is not always on the ...”

“... figures linked to News International were charged with breaching the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act – which deals with the interception of communication – and related offences. Their trial began in October 2013. Murdoch’s centrality to UK power was vividly illustrated. Brooks, his schmoozer-in-chief, popped into MI5 for briefings and hobnobbed ...”

“... in terms of material substrates, it’s been asked ‘What is it like to be a bat?’ – though Thomas Nagel’s famous essay of 1974 wasn’t really about the consciousness or sensory world of bats but about the consciousness and sensibilities of reductionist philosophers. (Nagel’s answer: we don’t know, and we certainly aren’t on the way to knowing ...”

“... weren’t scientists at all or whose scientific credentials had been burnished by the political powers. And there were the McCarthyite witch-hunts, some of which targeted distinguished scientists. How much autonomy did American scientists actually have? How vulnerable was that autonomy to the dictates of politicians and to the delusions of popular ...”

“... are peculiarly well-read, you might also spot the surprising rebirth of lines by the Cavalier poet Thomas Carew addressed to his beloved: Ask me no more where Jove bestows, When June is past, the fading rose: For in your Beauty’s orient deep, These flowers as in their causes, sleep. Appropriate in its strange way: Carew’s essence of beauty is the ...”

“... self-portrait’ is there, perhaps, in the form of Robertson Davies, Alasdair Gray, Russell Hoban, Thomas Pynchon.If critics too often reach for the same adjectives when describing Burgess’s work – comic, satirical, Swiftian, Rabelaisian – it’s because Burgess himself started rolling the ball in that direction. But to classify him as primarily a ...”

“... the infinite merge in the act of imaginative creation. To surrender oneself to dark, unknowable powers is to become all the more uniquely oneself. One must lose one’s life in order to find it. For one strain of Modernism, by contrast, the self is displaced by the very forces which constitute it – unhoused, scooped out, decentred and dispossessed. We are ...”

“... writing about the Atlantic as a site of cultural contact and confrontation between the European powers. Nevertheless, many of Miller’s examples involve encounters between empires, and patterns of influence that cross the language barrier. As The French Atlantic Triangle makes clear, the translations of a number of English texts – for instance, Aphra ...”

“... defences were in place in advance: ‘All is I suppose as well as can be expected by one with my powers of expectation.’ Thus armoured, he could allow himself to send his version of a cheery wave from holiday in Italy: ‘Nothing to tell that’s not better untold. Aches worse than in Paris, weather filthy.’ The line between stoicism and vindication ...”

“... in this period – Simon Schama’s Citizens and Paul Kennedy’s The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers – which reached a mass non-professorial audience. Kennedy’s book has, in fact, had a profound influence on political thinking in the United States. But what is more striking is Darnton’s own reaction to the ‘monographism’ which he perceived as ...”

“... of the literature of contemporary social analysis ranging from that composed by Fynes Moryson and Thomas Dineley in the 17th century through that written by Charles O’Conor and Sir Jonah Barrington in the 18th, and forward to that executed by Conrad Arensberg and Rosemary Harris in the present century. Due acknowledgement is made by Dr Foster whenever he ...”

“... It is a great strength of Lennard’s book that he does not allow any one of those four powers, ‘practice, art, method or system’, to lord it over the others; his argument depends on his keeping all four in play, referring to all, deferring to none, and leaving it to them to settle their differences. It is an allied strength that he takes so ...”