“... We are used to hard words from Belfast and the impingement (even in so wry and oblique a talent as Paul Muldoon) of uncomfortable sectarian truths. But McGuckian is like Denton Welch, whose war-diaries make no mention of the war: we can only just make out this century, let alone her own particular time and place. In a recent Muldoon poem which turns his fellow ...”

“... murder of several members of the South Korean Government in Burma in 1983 is flatly attributed to North Korea, but there is, as far as I know, no evidence for this. Of the attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II Laqueur can only comment that ‘the extent of Bulgarian involvement cannot be proven in a court of ...”

“... first transcend the boundaries of its geographical origins, adopted by the plains Indians to the north and then, in the late 19th century, starting to attract the interest of pharmaceutical companies and chemists.The trade in peyote beyond its natural habitat is probably as ancient as its use by humans. The buttons were dried in the desert sun and easily ...”

“... lessons in military prowess, colonial expansion and administration. Throughout the Western and North Atlantic world, as European and North American regimes grabbed ever larger swathes of the world’s landmass, Dio and Gibbon continued to shape curricula up to university level. Everything from the third century ce ...”

“... airport. It wasn‘t a random juxtaposition of places: the Rev. Hazlitt’s family were from the North of Ireland, and at some level my interest in his son’s writings must issue from a recognition that their combative Whig mentality and natural jouissance are rooted far back in the Ulster Enlightenment, especially in the work of Francis Hutcheson, the ...”

“... a harsh reassessment. Carlyle had earlier translated the whimsical German Romantic novelist Jean Paul Richter, lyrical and discursive by turns, a major influence on Sartor Resartus, and Marx now noted and deplored the pervasive effect on Carlyle’s style of this ‘literary apothecary’. Anthony Trollope and Edward Fitzgerald thought Carlyle had finally ...”

“... scandal that God loves them just as they are, in all their moral shabbiness. This is one reason St Paul remarks that the law is cursed. Dawkins sees Christianity in terms of a narrowly legalistic notion of atonement – of a brutally vindictive God sacrificing his own child in recompense for being offended – and describes the belief as vicious and ...”

“... Ovalle first saw the real-world mercenary processing centre run by the private firm Blackwater in North Carolina, he had to reach for the imagery of Cubby Broccoli. ‘It’s a private army in the 21st century,’ he gushed to Jeremy Scahill. It was like out of a Dr No movie … It’s a gigantic facility with a military urban terrain. It’s a mock city ...”

“... Both​ Paul Mason’s PostCapitalism: A Guide to Our Future and Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams’s Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World without Work advocate things that seemed to have disappeared from thinking on the left sometime in the late 1960s: technological optimism, futurism, the making of programmes and the issuing of demands as opposed to bearing witness through protest ...”

“... Bordoni:Which life is for meThe peaceful or the stormy?Which is the right manWalt Whitman or Paul Whiteman?Given the options of gay or straight, tempestuous or dependable, cruising or monogamous, Porter tended to chose both. He married Linda in 1919; they soon became ‘Les coleporteurs’, star turns on the Continental social merry-go-round. The ...”

“... have worried on the first score: Rome did not attempt to settle the matter until 1968, and Pope Paul VI’s encyclical of that year, Humanae Vitae, endorsing the traditional prohibition of artificial birth control, succeeded only in provoking a much more fundamental debate, which continues to this day, about authority and conscience as well as ...”

“... of foreign attack to justify new territorial acquisitions on the Subcontinent. In 1801 Tsar Paul ordered 20,000 Cossacks to ride south from Orenburg with the aim of beating Britain to some of it – though they had no maps for beyond the Oxus. This quixotic venture helped convince his courtiers that he had gone mad, triggering his assassination and the ...”

“... a section called ‘Biographical Notes’, should make the first entry read, ‘1905 21 June: Jean-Paul Sartre born in Paris’, and the last: ‘1980: Death of Sartre’. There are those for whom Simone de Beauvoir is important only because of her association with Sartre. Her four volumes of autobiography are sometimes seen merely as useful source material ...”

“... connection with one still uproven fact of limited general significance’. On the other hand, Paul Hyams hailed it as a blast of fresh air and the sort of book we need more of, and Ernest Gellner was equally enthusiastic about its intellectual daring. I thought it was a splendid piece of work: a small book with large implications. Moreover, in its main ...”

“... the Sunday Times and the Spectator. Carey’s cousins in populism sometimes include Simon Jenkins, Paul Johnson, A.N. Wilson and the late Auberon Waugh. An easy moralism animates this worldview. Picasso was a pig; Edmund Gosse was ‘a bore’; D.H. Lawrence hit Frieda and wanted to exterm-inate whole races; Virginia Woolf was a pretentious snob who said ...”