“... a dog, but not as receptive’, ‘dragged as companions into cots’; the dolls ‘themselves took no active part in these events,’ ‘letting themselves be dreamed’. Smith calls his subject Pygmalionism, or sometimes ‘agalmatophilia’, from a Greek word for ‘statue’, and his book is less interested in dolls as toys than it is in replica humans ...”

“... This spring, the entire country lost electricity for several hours, during which a leftist group took hostage the Istanbul prosecutor investigating the death of a teenager hit on the head with a tear gas canister. (The prosecutor later died in a shoot-out.) Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) has sought to expand police powers so that anyone with ...”

“... of Ambiguity, which became one of the founding books of modern literary criticism; Riding later took him to task for stealing the idea. Close reading later got itself a bad name after it was taken up by a group of poet-critics led by Graves and Riding’s one-time allies John Crowe Ransom and Allen Tate to fight a turf ...”

“... and pivoted grotesquely before at last tumbling free from their sockets as the grim separation took place at the soft centre of her, the tearing of Sarah’s muscle and cartilage and bone. Or perhaps it was only the basement door coming off its hinges, that made that awful cracking. Horror and grim laughter. Pete somehow still holds out hope that the ...”

“... affects everything else. I play a shitty bass guitar – open it up and it looks like someone took sandpaper to the wiring – and in every practice space and venue there’s a new interaction between my bass and the system or the room, a buzz or click or the sound of some radio transmission. Try to get clean, balanced sound that will soothe or terrify ...”

“... 23.27). As the rift deepens, so does the anti-Jewish rhetoric, culminating in the gospel of John, which describes the Jews as descendants of the devil and murderers of Christ. To be a Christian means, in an important sense, not being a Jew. As Erasmus put it: ‘If hatred of Jews makes the Christian, then we are all Christian.’ These anti-Jewish ...”

“... camp. Bar-Or said he had, though of course there was also ‘the well-known book by Dr John Adler’: ‘This is the outstanding book about Theresienstadt, and it is called Theresienstadt.’ judge halevi: Was he there? state prosecutor bar-or: He himself was in Theresienstadt. I simply hesitate to burden the court with material. This is an ...”

“... was a bit (or more than a bit) of a rogue, as, variously, Greer, Ackerley, David Cornwell (a.k.a. John le Carré) and Tobias Wolff did. Ackerley’s left two letters, ‘to be read only in the case of my death’, in which he revealed his ‘secret orchard’: the mistress and three daughters he’d been hiding for many years. Ackerley’s first reaction to ...”

“... description of a visit to the National Gallery of Art in Washington in 1970 when he walked down John Russell Pope’s majestic central hall, the last great classical building in the Western world, with the galleries on either side ‘crammed full of people who stood up and roared at me, waving their hands and stretching them out towards me’. He was ...”

“... republic can get fucked,’ one woman screamed in front of the Hôtel de Ville, where executions took place at the height of the Terror. ‘I shit on the nation!’ But diaries and memoirs from these years illustrate the exhilaration felt in all social groups at the unfolding spectacle. Those who lived through the revolution, whether as friend or foe, knew ...”

“... a number of illustrious admirers – including those poetic polar opposites, Geoffrey Hill and John Ashbery – his poetry is still not widely known. ‘Soldiers Bathing’, it’s true, is likely to feature in any anthology or critical account of the poetry of the Second World War, and assiduous scholars of both Hill and Ashbery have explored Prince’s ...”

“... Browne and Congreve as well as such less remembered figures as the sea captain Robert Knox, and John Chilton, who, Macdonald speculates, was ‘probably’ the author of Voyage to the West Indies … in the year 1560. The penalty for wearing so much learning lightly was, at this midpoint in her career, to be patronised by the more severe and humourless ...”

“... breakthroughs ‘followed by complete democratic breakdowns or coups d’état’. Democratisation took a more sedate course in Britain, Belgium, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden and Denmark, where – despite some resistance and occasional hazards – there was steady incremental progress towards settled democracy. Old conservative elites, Ziblatt ...”

“... 18 notebooks with spiritual reflections and saw the face of the Lord in the leaves of a tree. He took communion and confessed his sins. Then, in April 1993, he stumbled on another story, about a young boy who had lost all his senses; he was lifeless but still alive. At the thought of such futile suffering, Carrère’s faith folded. ‘I forsake ...”

“... not far from the President’s House, the third presidential mansion, where George Washington and John Adams lived, and a tourist destination for those who don’t leave colonial tours shaking the experience out of their heads as if in imitation of the Liberty Bell, Philly’s cracked symbol of freedom. For years, the historical society responsible for the ...”