“... it’s better to press on; and that one mustn’t fall into the arms of religion after the rout of hope. Steinmetz, ingeniously, also hears it as a call to the ends of the earth. ‘The truly modern man,’ he remarks elsewhere, ‘is the merchant, the engineer, full of youthful energy, who heads for parts of the world where gold and silver are plentiful, and ...”

“... led him in the eyes of many to betray his left-wing views altogether. Such, no doubt, is how Christopher Hitchens will be remembered. The resemblances to George Orwell, on whom Hitchens has written so admiringly,* are obvious enough, though so are some key differences. Orwell was a kind of literary proletarian who lived in dire straits for most of his ...”

“... and on 30 January he tweeted a denunciation of his intelligence chiefs Dan Coats, Gina Haspel and Christopher Wray: they were ‘naive’ for telling the Senate that Iran wasn’t working on a nuclear weapon. Half of Trump’s argument for exiting the agreement Obama signed with Iran in 2015, along with the UK, France, China, Russia and Germany, was that the ...”

“... mental reservations, international agreements would be impossible. French diplomatic maxim Christopher Francis Patten, Hong Kong’s last governor, famously wept just before he left aboard the royal yacht Britannia at midnight on 30 June, while sirens whooped and rockets soared over Asia’s most stunning harbour. Tears of joy? Relief? Despair? The ...”

“... of novels, books, pamphlets, old mandarin oranges, old apple cores, condoms still living in hope. Catriona made clear that this would all have to go; the house would have to be made hospital-clean. No dishes could be left in the sink. Food would be thrown out when it had reached its sell-by date. The inner reaches of the fridge would be cleared of ...”

“... century, John Bayley’s Keats and Reality – a study acknowledged as seminal by two critics (Christopher Ricks and John Jones) whose admirable books declare themselves indebted to it, and whom Helen Vendler does include in her list. Presumably her hostility to Keats and Reality (she disagrees with its author twice and sharply) springs from John ...”

“... a nearby undercover CIA facility in Benghazi, which resulted in the death of the US ambassador, Christopher Stevens, and three others. The report’s criticism of the State Department for not providing adequate security at the consulate, and of the intelligence community for not alerting the US military to the presence of a CIA outpost in the area, received ...”

“... rare direct comment on dress, but since the novel is a parody the remark is ironic, as defined by Christopher Ricks, in that it is both true and not true to the same extent at the same time. ‘Woman is fine for her satisfaction alone,’ Austen writes. ‘No man will admire her the more, no woman will like her the better for it.’ In parody the text works ...”

“... lot of stuff I didn’t want to hear.’ She decided to stop talking to the bot. Her half-brother, Christopher Jones, commiserates with her and says she’s fallen for ‘death capitalism … they lure you into something in a vulnerable moment.’Both Barbeau and Angel used an app called Project December, the founder of which, Jason Rohrer, is profiled in ...”

“... think, and that the easy dismissals on the part of such detractors as Terry Eagleton and Christopher Norris are founded on political prejudice and uninformed assumptions. Shusterman emphasises the Aristotelian studies, and the attack on Descartes in the unpublished Clark Lectures of 1926, which deplores that philosopher’s upsetting of ...”

“... usually say about life on earth: it certainly seems a bit short on the Pauline virtue of hope, say.Nancy Mitford remembered reproaching Waugh for behaving with quite unprompted unkindness to a young admirer at dinner: ‘You have no idea how much nastier I would be if I was not a Catholic,’ he replied. ‘Without supernatural aid I would hardly be ...”

“... acquired, though Lucasta Miller’s The Brontë Myth (2001) did as much as one might reasonably hope (or wish) to read. Last year was the first of the Brontë children’s bicentenaries: Charlotte was born in 1816, Patrick Branwell in 1817, Emily in 1818 and Anne in 1820. The anniversary books are already many. There are luxury editions, befitting the ...”

“... he writes to his first-born, Michael, in 1941. ‘My dearest,’ he addresses his younger son, Christopher, in 1944.What else can we learn from Tolkien’s letters? Well, he loved trees and the English countryside, and hated cars and machinery. He hated France and the French, although he did like Venice: ‘elvishly lovely’, he said. He loathed ‘that ...”

“... The Cool Britannia eat-by date is long expired, and they know it, but they cling to the lingering hope of a deregulated country where they can link up with other Eritreans – there are 40,000 in Britain – and find a way of life.A thin Ethiopian, spooning up a charity risotto, admits very cautiously to a ‘political problem’ in Addis Ababa, and goes on ...”

“... I think, have longer skirts, and I am beginning to see that youth cannot last for ever, and now hope to be taken for older than I am. The onset of boyhood has been postponed, so far. But patience is a virtue with me. We go to Blackpool to stay at Mrs Scott’s boarding-house, just the three of us, all together: my mother, my father, myself.I insist that we ...”