“... lead to the unfolding of truth but to a collision of different realities, each one of which may hold a certain emotional, linguistic or even logical validity. Faced with that paradox, why not indulge in a little stylistic flourish? This simple but occasionally unpalatable awareness, with its patina of watered down Post-Modernism, was central to ...”

“... contexts, constitute the first-time reader’s most familiar point of entry. Such moments may also provide their most compelling inducements to read on: No resolve about places, the latch-key to our drifting lives, seems relevant without this smallest notion of dust. How to purge the dismal objection to this, remains a question. Not to be ...”

“... in making these charges, puts himself on a level with Kissinger, so that, however briefly, they may have to be mentioned in the same breath. His anger alerts us to the least attractive aspect of this book. There is a moment when Hitchens explains how he took the idea to the editor of Harper’s who, before Hitchens could fully explain the ...”

“... the Tower was in abeyance. After the Restoration Samuel Pepys often looked in. Any ferocities he may have witnessed would hardly have disturbed one who had turned out to see a live major-general hacked to pieces at Charing Cross. Baiting, Hahn says, went on ‘for some time’ before being criminalised. In fact it was still flourishing when Queen Victoria ...”

“... Reviewers rarely feel it prudent to begin by confessing bafflement, but the admission may sometimes be unavoidable. This is my sentiment as I contemplate the four novels of Alan Warner. He has been highly praised (‘dazzling’, ‘classic’, ‘significant’, ‘vastly gifted’, ‘a genius’, ‘one of the most influential literary mould-breakers ever’), and I’m sure none of these eulogies, understandably preserved on the covers of his books, is entirely unmerited ...”

“... is, but the process has suddenly accelerated on me.’ The worry at this stage is that the system may soon have failed entirely and we’ll be left in the lurch. I don’t relish a world without Hitchens: along with many people, I like to hear from a man of principle at moments when recourse to principle strikes him as the greater part of valour, and listen ...”

“... the earliest among them were written by someone who never met him in his earthly life; the latest may postdate his death on the cross by about a century. They are coloured by preoccupations which were not those of Jesus himself, and they fuelled the development of a church which became radically different from anything Jesus or the first generation of his ...”

“... as if they were familiar with the works cited. If he has given up this particular pleasure it may be because he tired of the game, or because the internet has made checking so easy. (The epigraph of Harvest is from Pope, and search engines get behind it.) It would be just his style to make up a bit of Tudor inheritance law to smooth his plot, and then sit ...”

“... the track’s safety systems had been contracted out, in contrast to the usual practice, which may have resulted in the lack of padding on the column the victim collided with at turn 16. But Petroski also suggests that financial gain shaped the design. He quotes from a post-mortem in the Wall Street Journal: ‘The course’s dangers became part of its ...”

“... states of affairs (‘walking’ as a kind of event, whenever and wherever such an event may happen). In order that they might represent the worlds of experience and imagination, such symbols have to be put together with ‘indexical’ signs, as Peirce termed them, such as articles (the, some), demonstratives (this, those), tense-inflections ...”

“... in Europe, 1560-1660, along with other pieces previously published in Past and Present. The volume may inadvertently have launched the most persistent criticism of the whole idea of a crisis: that ‘crisis’ is for the 17th century what ‘history’ is for other centuries. Hobsbawm’s theory lost currency with the decline and fall of doctrinaire Marxist ...”

“... Thorpe’s sister, eventually committed suicide; his paternal grandfather was an archdeacon. In May 1968, Thorpe married Caroline Allpass, who died in a car crash 11 days after the 1970 general election. His second wife, Marion Stein, was a refugee from prewar Vienna who had been married to the earl of Harewood, and remained with Thorpe until her death ...”

“... In​ New York in the 1960s, your first sight of gay pornography may well have been in public, looking in a sex shop window. If you were a gay kid, but closeted you would have reacted with pleasure, certainly, maybe even bliss – what Roland Barthes called jouissance. But there would also have been an inexplicable, almost sickening lust, and the fear of being seen looking ...”

“... the English are more negative than seems justified by the people and situations he describes, and may have been added or amplified after the disappointing outcome of his mission. He frequently echoes the remark that Napoleon is reputed to have made about the English being a nation of shopkeepers, a characteristic that must have been especially annoying to ...”

“... son of politics. Although from age to age the nature of the bond joining parent and offspring may vary, the connecting tissue itself remains indissoluble. To fancy otherwise – speculating about one without realistically accounting for the other – is to disregard all of recorded history. Yet a remarkable number of writers persist in trying. To be ...”