“... is history in a nutshell.’ And indeed it is. But whose history? Exemplary as this Irish martyr may be, the priest is unable to identify him because he does not feature in the standard martyrology of Irish nationalism. He is, of course, Oscar Wilde. By the time this satirical scene occurs, two-thirds of the way through At Swim, Two Boys, Jamie O’Neill’s ...”

“... hundreds of miles to the south-west, in the Bay of Bengal. The monsoon season usually starts in May, as the land heats up faster than the ocean and the colder, higher-pressure air blows in from the sea (the same thing happens on a much, much smaller scale in Torquay or Scarborough on warm summer mornings), bringing storm clouds and heavy ...”

“... is not and has never been humanly feasible.’ ‘At home – chez soi – one is a potentate; one may grant an outsider relief from the outside; and this must be what I yearn for.’ ‘I think that what I’ve wanted, most of all, is someone nice and safe to hang out with.’ Plus, despite his failure to reproduce with Jenn, ‘I have always wanted ...”

“... criticism of Leibniz would not be tolerated. The committee responsible for the 1755 competition may have hoped to avoid trouble by changing the subject to Pope’s Essay on Man, but if so they were mistaken. The jury was dominated by a group of Leibnizians who had secretly promised victory to one of their friends, but their scheme collapsed when one of them ...”

“... weeks ago – though, of course, I heard bits and scraps’. The letter is dated 1627, so there may be a joke here rather than an error. Still, I don’t think we need to see Joyce as being disingenuous – David Greetham wonders about this in an essay in a booklet accompanying the new edition of Finnegans Wake – since we know what he could do with bits ...”

“... dominant version, liberalism – sets about applying morality to politics. In what future writers may come to think of as the palmy days of political moralism, theorists have tried to imagine what politics would be like if it were redesigned according to a moral prospectus. It is not usually thought that actually existing politics shadows moral norms very ...”

“... criticism of Israel is excessive, the earlier adulation was, and that an answer to present woes may be found in the history of Zionism, including the period just before the birth of the state described in Norman Rose’s ‘A Senseless, Squalid War’ and David Cesarani’s Major Farran’s Hat. Both books deal with the last years of the Mandate, when the ...”

“... novel itself). Luck, to be sure, plays a fundamental role in the Bildungsroman in general, and it may be worth recalling the paradigmatic ending of the first and most influential of them, Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, of whose hero it is said: ‘You make me think of Saul, son of Kish, who went forth to seek his father’s lost asses and ...”

“... of them and of all dominion and authority into the hands of the foreign foe.’ Al-Afghani may have been exaggerating. But he knew from his experiences in India and Egypt how quickly the West’s seemingly innocuous traders and bankers could turn into diplomats and soldiers. The feckless shah had already compromised Iran’s relative immunity to ...”

“... over the next four years. The biggest single discovery in the history of Russian oil was made in May 1965: the super-giant Samotlor field, at its peak in the 1980s the world’s second largest, and even now among the top half-dozen, producing more than 35 million tons of crude a year. West Siberian oil quickly came to play a central role in the Soviet ...”

“... in European societies. Given that the poorest 5 per cent of the population in a Western country may be better off than the richest 5 per cent in Africa or India, it is always going to be difficult to establish a popular platform for the discussion of global redistribution. Perhaps for this reason, over the past decade the debate about global inequality has ...”

“... example, brought frequent reprimands, but he remained unkempt; the mess a painter inevitably makes may have secretly been a compelling attraction. That Cézanne became an artist at all, rather than the provincial lawyer he might have been had Louis-Auguste had his way, is due in part to the remarkable fact that his schoolmate at the Collège Bourbon was Emile ...”

“... loyal translation:        So Plotinus teaches us in his books, which are nine. It may be that our brief life is the fleeting reflection of the divine. Or in the following lamentable lines, which sound like an authentic invitation to return to the economy (and the poetry) of prose: En un confín del vasto Sur persiste esa alta cosa, vagamente ...”

“... a third term into a situation that otherwise consists of but two opposing forces’. Permissions may need to be negotiated, subjects and audiences invited to consent: ‘This freedom is important … If you choose to abandon ship, you can then ponder the classic question. Did I fail the work, or did it fail me?’ The argument of the book itself enacts this ...”

“... crystal ball, sky and a sky, and sky, and sky, till death – Well – death and the void may be part of it. City parks by night do have something sepulchral about them. The little white blobs of the streetlamps in Winter Evening don’t seem to be holding off January’s chill. But look again at the painting … My language so far has betrayed its ...”