“... Santerre family, Catholic French Canadians displaced to Southern California, and later dispersed more widely across the United States and the rest of the world. The book – chosen as a Richard and Judy Summer Read, though that shouldn’t be held against it – begins with Teddy and Yvette’s wedding in Santa Barbara during the Second World War, and ends ...”

“... and fragile’, ‘the Venice of the new millennium’.* New York – or Manhattan, more precisely the subject of Gopnik’s book – has indeed become like Venice, but not because it’s fragile. It is more of a resort city than ever. This transformation occurred despite 9/11 – plans to make Manhattan ...”

“... Although Thomas Hobbes lived to be 91, and was one of the most famous philosophers of his day, there are only 211 surviving letters to or from him. This compares with 3656 to or from Locke, some twenty thousand to or from Leibniz. For the last three decades of his life Hobbes suffered from Parkinson’s disease, but he always had the assistance of a secretary, and he seems to have replied to letters whenever he received them ...”

“... revolution was the major factor in all the other revolutions with which we are concerned, more important than the Turkish conquest, the discovery and colonisation of America or the imperial vocation of Spain. Had it not been for the increase in the number of men, would any of these glorious chapters ever have been written?... The increase lay behind ...”

“... most of the opportunity. Enormous posters of Marx, Lenin and Stalin were everywhere to be seen. More important, Negrin treated the Russians as indispensable friends. But the Republicans had no alternative beyond the unacceptable one of making peace. Given Negrin’s need for arms and the refusal of the British and French to supply them on anything like the ...”

“... lazily flaps up from having poked a hole in a green garbage bag’ – makes living in it somehow more tolerable. The implication is not quite that the unexamined life is not worth living, rather that an unexamined world isn’t worth living in. ‘Well, he is still alive, seeing what he sees. He supposes this is a good thing, but it is an effort.’ These ...”

“... reason for his dejection: his mother, who was visiting, left eight days before, and he misses her more than he wants to admit. Chaudhuri is a master of the inconsequential detail, or rather of describing quotidian, often overlooked details that matter to the character observing or experiencing them, or take on a new consequence in his describing of ...”

“... and his place in it while staring into space, he instead thinks about the meaning of life, or more often the lack of it, as he’s peering into the brightly lit mouths of his patients: My last patient of the day was a five-year-old complaining of a loose tooth. I had the parents pegged for the type that would send their child to see a brain specialist if ...”

“... and rages seem native to the realistic novel. One is also grateful for Jill Eisenstadt’s more straightforward ability to use smart writing to make a teen plot seem a true account of the place she grew up in. Patrick O’Brian’s stories of Napoleonic sea war have a vivacity which Hugh Thomas’s ...”

“... virtues also, the first and foremost being that it is a splendid work of research. An appendix of more than a hundred pages – it is a massive volume – lists almost a hundred and fifty middle-class Victorian collectors, with brief biographies and details of their occupations, taste and methods of buying. (Surprisingly, she omits Alexander ...”

“... on the promise of Native Son, the incendiary tale of a poor black chauffeur in Chicago, Bigger Thomas, who achieves a grisly sense of selfhood after killing two women: his black girlfriend and the daughter of his wealthy white employer. But even that novel’s reputation declined, thanks in large part to another black American in Paris. In 1949 James ...”

“... for his speeches – ‘Dollar a minute or sixty minutes for fifty dollars. I have to ask a little more where I introduce my adjectives immediately after instead of before my nouns’ – he isn’t just announcing that he’s finally made it, he’s saying that he doesn’t mind being seen to be on the make. Frost’s difficult childhood would continue to ...”

“... closely at the full range of their effects, to determine whether they have ‘worked’ in some more qualified sense. He distinguishes three further senses, short of strategic victory, in which terrorism might be said to work: partial strategic victory, tactical success and the inherent rewards of struggle as such – and there are further subdivisions ...”

“... real and so-called, there are fewer resources to go around and the use of those resources is more intensively policed. As a result, the environment in which today’s students and academics work has sharply deteriorated. When I think of the freedom I enjoyed as a young Oxford don, with no one telling me how to teach or what I should research or how I ...”

“... the piece which completes the jigsaw, putting at the centre of the first half of the 16th century Thomas Cranmer, the archbishop with the beard who created the Church of England. Cranmer’s beard dominates the cover. Instead of the familiar Flicke portrait of a clean-shaven prelate, MacCulloch or his editor (I’d bet it was MacCulloch’s choice) has ...”