“... a whodunnit with a romantic agenda. Not far into her sequence of Adamsberg books Vargas took the risk, with her detective – magnetic despite the scruffiness – having an affair with Camille Forestier, not a waitress/actress but that rarer hybrid, a musician/plumber. In Seeking Whom He May Devour (1999, translated 2004) it was Camille, on her ...”

“... the Persians, or perhaps by a renegade Roman soldier. Others believed God had taken no chances. John Malalas, the author of a sixth-century chronicle of the world that began with the Creation, reported a dream in which a bishop transported to heaven witnessed an enthroned Christ instruct the martyr-saint Mercurius: ‘Go forth and kill the emperor ...”

“... of the sort that his more literal-minded admirers expected to find. Demobbed in 1946, he took up his deferred place at Harvard where, with what he came to consider a ‘hysterical disregard for practicality’, he decided to major in French. For his English classes he wrote Firbankian short stories in a manner an unsympathetic tutor described as ...”

“... looking at Michael’s hands on the wheel and thinking how much nicer they are than my hands.*‘John Lennon,’ Michael said. ‘That’s the first thing Mum remembers, him being shot.’I said, ‘Is it?’‘Well, that’s what you told me.’Maureen is doing her homework. ‘It’s Miss Macaulay,’ said Michael. ‘Milestones. We did it two years ...”

“... Mare hero-worshipped Hardy, whom he first visited at Max Gate in June 1921. As was his wont, Hardy took him to the graves of Emma and his parents and sister in Stinsford churchyard, where de la Mare watched him scrape off the moss from their tombstones with a homemade implement contrived for that purpose. They shared an interest in ghosts and graveyards, in ...”

“... besides. When the Bill making the registration of births compulsory was introduced in 1836, Lord John Russell, recommending it to Parliament, said that everyone would ‘so soon perceive the benefit of having their children’s names inserted in the general register that it would not be very long before every one would be willing to concur in carrying out ...”

“... of port, the quiet converse of enlightened men!’ It is not surprising the signalman’s son took this amiss. In fact, Edward had admirably explained his address. Speaking of ‘genuine communication’, Raymond had said: ‘You can feel the pause and effort; the necessary openness and honesty of a man listening to another, in good faith, and then ...”

“... thought and action. It may even re-create that necessary illusion which scientific explanation took away, the illusion of human freedom. The third intellectual motive behind this kind of criticism contradicts such speculations. If it is combined with them, it is because the seekers after ‘human’ understanding have been reluctant to relinquish, in their ...”

“... other consists (or did in 1971) of playgoers for whom the theatre has never been the same since John Osborne, and if they don’t like a play they leave it in droves. Indeed, it sometimes seems that their chief pleasure in going to the theatre in Brighton is in leaving it, and leaving it as noisily as possible. In Beyond the Fringe the seats were going up ...”

“... along with Catholics and Jews. Violence against the institutions of state, on the other hand, took the form, not of frontal assaults, but of symbolic attacks on ‘soft’ targets, as Fischer himself notes. It was the scale rather than the direction of Stormtrooper violence that disturbed Hitler and his respectable allies. This is an important ...”

“... Eventful Years in Paraguay and Edward East wick’s Venezuela; also – a fact first announced by John Halverson and Ian Watt – that the ‘life story of an American seaman’ which Conrad claimed to have found on a second-hand bookstall and to have helped him to find his plot, was On Many Seas by Frederick Benton Williams. This latter identification is ...”

“... legally in the United States, so there was no merit in doing heavy work on the text. When Judge John Woolsey lifted the ban on the book – 6 December 1933 – Bennett Cerf set about issuing a new edition. But the text he gave his printers was a copy of Samuel Roth’s facsimile pirated edition, printed in New York: its errors remained to corrupt Cerf’s ...”

“... has come to be called a ‘degenerate research programme’. In moral philosophy this abandonment took the form, by and large, of turning away not only from the logical positivists’ answers but from their questions too. Instead of proposing alternative accounts of what moral assertions were, the generation that started writing in the Sixties and Seventies ...”

“... of Pastoral – and since I have never read its chapters in sequence, I chose the first method: took the book as a book and then went back to the essays and reviews. The result was not just intriguing but moving. It’s true that The Dyer’s Hand is not systematic criticism, or systematic anything, and Mendelson reminds us that Auden ‘never explained in ...”

“... far and wide, until every family catches infection from it.The idea of England as endangered took root. Preserving proper boundaries, keeping England white, was seen by many as a priority. Two years later Long published his three-volume History of Jamaica, in which he argued that black people were essentially different from and inferior to white ...”