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“... the cannon and the firing-squad against the drawing-room and the kitchen stove. At the end of David Pownall’s book the protagonist and his confidant are shot. At the end of John Hearne’s the leading characters have been respectively drowned, decapitated and disembowelled, and the hero is about to be hanged. Ann Schlee’s story ends with her heroine ...”

“... As a colleague of David Simpson at the University of California and a friend graciously thanked in his acknowledgments, can I pretend to have the disinterestedness necessary to write an objective review of his book? Or, as a reviewer opening with a confession of this sort – what in the lingo of our day is called a ‘full disclosure’ – have I then somehow neutralised my personal stake in such a way that I can offer my opinion as unbiased? Can such reflexivity work to undo the debilitating effects of situatedness? These are the kinds of question that agonise Simpson, who has written Situatedness in the hope of stemming the tide of what he calls, following Andrew Sullivan, ‘azza’ declarations – ‘as a colleague of David Simpson’; ‘as a white, middle-class male’ – in the age of identity politics ...”

“... at the front of the book; but then this is Dave Eggers, so it isn’t by any means a conventional introduction, and out of context would be hard to identify as of the category. It reads more like a story, or an allegory. Eggers has pulled off his usual trick of threatening to be irritating, and then managing by a whisker not to be and ...”

“... retired at the end of the 1955-6 year, Bloch was now isolated from student life, though by no means disgraced. He retained a second academic post, and in 1959 Aufbau published the first volume of Das Prinzip Hoffnung. By then he had already secured an alternative publishing outlet in the West, thanks to the links with the Suhrkamp Verlag in Frankfurt ...”

“... presumptuously – readable. Unlike the poems, they were not digressions. They represented the means by which Kipling hoped to establish himself in society: not as an irritant, but as a reliable witness and a shaper of opinion. They will, as Professor Pinney suggests, change our view of his early career. In his autobiography, Something of Myself, Kipling ...”

“... back in Athens whenever foreign invaders or disaffected elites tried to snuff it out. It also means that democratic institutions showed verve and drive in trying to find practical solutions to technical problems that threatened to overwhelm the state. Like the most durable football teams, Athenian democracy did everything it could to prevent a run of bad ...”

“... but not without hope. John Fuller’s The Burning Boys is interested in other kinds of separation. David’s mother is killed in the Blitz, and he goes to live with his down-to-earth grandmother and nubile young aunt. His life goes underground. David covertly observes the strange adult goings-on around him, approaching ...”

“... the face of the Madonna looking very like the pictures Raphael or Perugino painted of her. David Blackhourn has produced an exhaustive study of the apparitions of the Madonna in July 1876 in Marpingen, and the turbulent aftermath which embroiled the Army, the Berlin secret police, and the Prussian Parliament. An obscure village of around 1600 ...”

“... lovely Ariane Deume, née Ariane Cassandre Corisande d’Auble, ‘very top-drawer in Geneva’ as David Coward nicely renders ‘ce qui se fait de mieux à Genève’. The two horses suggest Solal hopes to abduct the girl right now, but he has other tricks up his sleeve, in spite of his bare breast. He appears to be thinking of killing himself, and he dons an ...”

“... unless you accept that there is no substitute for, no viable alternative to, clarity. According to David Matthews, Tippett himself has come close to this view – ever since the early Sixties, when he ‘joined Britten in a liking for clear, uncluttered textures’. Did he? And has he thus continued? On and off. His most recent, Fourth Quartet (1977-8) is a ...”

“... Napoleana and tiger skins – set about appropriating the country’s wealth by more sophisticated means. The Pahlevi Foundation was set up in 1958, ostensibly for charitable purposes. ‘By 1979 its assets were estimated at around $3 billion. Between them the Royal Family and the Pahlevi Foundation were thought to control 80 per cent of the cement industry in ...”

“... In David Grossman’s 1998 novel, Be My Knife, an antiquarian book-dealer starts a passionate correspondence with a woman whom he has barely caught sight of across a room. The unlikely circumstances of their relationship, its unusual fusion of intimacy and distance, allow them to say, or rather write, things which neither of them has ever admitted before ...”

“... is super,’ the T-shirts used to say. The new version is ‘Zimbabwe is kenge,’ which means roughly the same thing. David Caute’s portrait of white mores is savage, but like so many visitors before and after him, he was fascinated – seduced – by Rhodesia. It was, and is, a country which captivates even as ...”

“... he told the Whitehall Conference that since the Bible contained ‘a promise of their conversion, means must be used to that end, which was the preaching of the Gospel, and that could not be had unless they were permitted to reside where the Gospel was preached.’ Yet if the opposition which surfaced at the conference dissuaded the government from ...”

“... most effectively be raised by moving as quickly as possible to capital-intensive mass production. David Hume’s alternative, to think in terms of a ‘product cycle’, of simple agriculture at one end and advanced manufacture at the other, and to position oneself at the point at which one could make the most of one’s endowments and of trade with other ...”