“... are not better than they were before the ceasefire. They are worse.’ Roddy Doyle’s Ireland may (O’Brien admits) look different to outsiders, and be notable for an absence of ‘wild Serbs or furious Croats’. Be not deceived. Just beneath this secular and European veneer dwells the ancestral dark: ‘God Land is in there, deep down. It whispers to ...”

“... less sympathetically on his compulsive rituals, facial tics, and the strange noises he made, which may have been symptoms of Tourette’s syndrome. In later life, Johnson told a friend that he had never tried to make a good impression on anyone until after the age of thirty, ‘considering the matter as hopeless’. He disliked speaking about his background ...”

“... people are shouting, windows are cracking, and everyone is being called on to leave. The building may be about to collapse. An amazing high-angle shot from a window shows an excavator digging up the ground next door – presumably the cause of the trouble, making all proximate foundations slip. The camera concentrates on one married couple in their rush to ...”

“... me be, reproachful as always the dead are, however in life indulgent. Friends, whom I never more may meet again, On springy heath, along the hill-top edge, Wander in gladness, and wind down, perchance, To that still roaring dell, of which I told; The roaring dell ... ’                Dells round Brook Cottage must, and that whole dell ...”

“... traditionally cosseted and deferred-to male breadwinner. After his death in 1973, such irritation may have contributed to some of the more critical reappraisals of his legacy, encouraged by the larger turn in political thinking away from the collectivist and redistributive ideals of social policy he had championed so eloquently. Yet early in the 21st century ...”

“... No Secrets, and Says He’ll Prove It’ – so ran the main headline in the New York Times on 18 May. The subject was Donald Trump’s supposed revelation of foreign intelligence assets when he met with Russian officials in the Oval Office. It isn’t yet clear if anything dangerous was done, but the US media were showcasing their heavy artillery with a leak ...”

“... financial rewards: the Roman Empire is one example, Restoration England another. Or the state may proclaim a duty to denounce and punish citizens who fail to honour it: Muscovite Russia comes immediately to mind, but the Napoleonic Penal Code made similar provision. During the Spanish Inquisition, as Henry Kamen writes, ‘there was no need to rely on a ...”

“... which was ultimately, if not immediately, grounded in the supernatural. These may be the dichotomies one takes for granted, reinforced as they so often are with a wealth of anecdote. ‘Theology and Parsondom’ were, for T.H. Huxley, ‘the natural and irreconcilable enemies of science’. His professional rival Richard Owen, by ...”

“... died a year ago, on 11 April 1987, to the dismay of his readers, and The Drowned and the Saved may well be the last of his writings to be translated and reviewed in this country. There was a time when it must have seemed to many that he would never receive a bad review, or even a cross word. His first book, If This Is a Man, about his months in ...”

“... Why … are people prepared to lay down their lives for their country?’ Some of the answers may lie in the enabling detachment of kinship emotion from its original sources. Such feelings can be strengthened, even as they are diffused or redeployed. Because this kind of siblinghood is ‘metaphorical’, it doesn’t follow that it’s weaker, or watered ...”

“... a ‘modifier’ will tell us less and less about how it actually works. At the limit, we may be able to accommodate every imaginable kind of tool within our ‘modification’ theory, but only at the price of evacuating the theory of any content. Rather than revealing that the underlying essence of tools is that they modify something, we have simply ...”

“... on the craft of biography called Ventilations, Pearson gave examples of how the non-fiction writer may use his fancy to improve on fact – a perversion of Wordsworth’s prescription, which Pearson renounced for solid Johnsonian principles of biography once he became a professional biographer himself in the 1930s. It seems to have been Mr Pennington’s aim ...”

“... on Pythagoras and the Stoics. I have no competence to evaluate his argument, but I suspect that he may have taken too much on. He rests his case on the similarities between Buddhism and Greek philosophy, together with the material feasibility of travel between the Indian and the Greek worlds, but specialists would probably demand more detailed ...”

“... from the tradition of teaching rhetoric and oratory in the antebellum college. Oratory may have seemed relevant to the later careers of the small social elite who attended the old colleges, but writing was the more necessary skill for the vastly expanded number being disgorged from universities in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.The history ...”

“... will, summed up by the authors as ‘democracy’. Readers are warned that the book’s argument may not be ‘immediately clear’ and are exhorted to be patient, for Multitude is ‘a mosaic from which the general design gradually emerges’. Before turning to that design, it’s important to stress how welcome this expansiveness is. In a venture like ...”