“... and China in particular, sells books in the West and always has done. Marco Polo knew this, as did John Mandeville, that great early impresario of the exotic. It has appealed at a general level as a substantial, unknown space into which, with the right promptings, the individual imagination could rush, expand, unfurl and luxuriate. More specifically, it has ...”

“... and public policy from them. This is the opinion of many who practise philosophy in the manner of John Rawls and Ronald Dworkin. Philosophical reflection on the nature of toleration, Newey contends, shows that this is wrongheaded. It is, Lord knows, not the abstraction that Newey objects to, but – quite rightly – the conceit that philosophical reflection ...”

“... for the 1968-69 tour to South Africa, leading to the tour’s cancellation by a furious John Vorster – aroused such strong emotions. There was never any doubt that Vorster’s government had acted abominably, but what hurt just as much was the suspicion – always ringingly denied by the English cricket establishment – that they had deliberately ...”

“... Erinyes optimistically renamed ‘the kindly ones’ at the end of Aeschylus’ Oresteia. (John Lyly had also bestowed it on a questing knight in his comedy Endimion a few years before Peele.) Like Shakespeare’s notorious sea-coast of Bohemia, Catita cannot be found on any map, nor can a winged Jackanapes improbably flying with its tail in its mouth ...”

“... shimmering slightly, but with a wooden dullness behind the eyes. There is a poem attributed to John Skelton called ‘The Harmony of Birds’, in which a chorus of fowl sing individually and together in praise of God. The poet takes a walk in the countryside, and stops by a tree, ‘Whereon dyd lyght/Byrdes as thycke/As sterres in the skye,/Praisyng our ...”

“... by older biographers as they sought to confer a fitting lateness on the composer, who died at 35. John Deathridge’s chapter on Wagner will probably outlast the other contributions; he shows that Wagner, even when he was working on his last opera, Parsifal, really wanted to be writing symphonies. Deathridge provides some sketches, stillborn congeners of the ...”

“... up into the girl’s narrative. Award nominations followed: Booker longlist, Orange shortlist, John Llewellyn Rhys Prize shortlist, Commonwealth Writers’ First Book Prize. Her new novel goes further. Half of a Yellow Sun – the title refers to the emblem on the Biafran flag – is narrated in the third person and switches, chapter by chapter, between ...”

“... becomes a little more like a dialogue in the selection of red chalk drawings by William Hodges and John Webber from Captain Cook’s voyages, in which the vigour of the artists’ gaze is checked, and rewarded, by a powerful intimation of life and consciousness in the sitters. Meanwhile a clever association is made between the European interest in exterior and ...”

“... ethnic conflict. American reviewers have been unable to resist comparing Shteyngart’s book with John Kennedy Toole’s Confederacy of Dunces, though the two novels share very little beyond an omnivorous, obese hero who falls for a girl from the Bronx. Temperamentally, Misha Vainberg is Ignatius Reilly’s opposite. Reilly railed against the lack of ...”

“... to a personal ‘demon’, and the mild fascination with the occult shared by Pliny the Elder, John Buchan, and generations of ghost-story enthusiasts and horror-movie buffs? Pascal Boyer tells us in his opening chapter that ‘religion is about the existence and causal powers of non-observable entities and agencies.’ He doesn’t appear to have in mind ...”

“... The history of England,’ Sir John Seeley declared in The Expansion of England (1883), ‘is not in England but in America and Asia.’ Like many aphorisms, this was at once consciously perverse and entirely apt. Seeley wrote as a fervid supporter of imperial federation, ‘Greater Britain’, but he was also taking issue, as in a preceding series of lectures delivered at Cambridge, with the introspection that characterised so much contemporary English historical writing ...”

“... At a New York cocktail party shortly after the war, a young and insecure physics postgraduate was heard to blurt out to a woman he had met there: ‘I just want to know what Truth is!’ This was Thomas Kuhn and what he meant was that specific truths such as those of physics mattered less to him than acquiring metaphysical knowledge of the nature of truth ...”

“... going to get it done hard and fast and get out. Winning – as a famous old football coach called John Madden likes to say on his radio segment in San Francisco – is a great deodorant. But now they’re calling in the script doctors, fast. But wait. Here comes Osama’s right-hand no-good, Ayman al-Zawahiri, appearing on al-Jazeera with a picture of the ...”

“... from time to time exhibit selected Screen Tests. The idea was already in the air. The neo-dadaist, John Cage-influenced Fluxus artists were already making similar perversely conceptual films. At least a year before Warhol began documenting faces for The 13 Most Beautiful Boys, the Icelandic political pop artist Erró, then based in New York, was at work on a ...”

“... I don’t think they flow from his religious commitment. In giving his own interpretation of John Paul II’s encyclical ‘Faith and Reason’, MacIntyre says: It is characteristic of human beings that, whatever our culture, we desire to know and to understand, that we cannot but set ourselves the achievement of truth as a goal. And among the truths to ...”