“... Cooper by concluding that ‘it is too useful an idea to be thrown away,’ but adding that ‘it may be wise to accept it as a fuzzy abstraction.’ Using the idea of ‘three great civilisational zones’ – China, Islamdom and Europe – as his starting point, he sketches a broad comparative framework, drawing on the classic work of Mark Elvin from the ...”

“... point, Sedley seems to side with the creationists; at any rate, he says that, whatever else you may believe, ‘you cannot avoid saying that the heart is for pumping blood, the eyelid for protecting the eye . . . Adequate non-teleological explanations of the parts of the eye are simply not available.’ But you can quite easily ‘avoid saying that the ...”

“... to stretch up to thee, nor hands to join before thee; my feet are cut off and my knees, so that I may not bow them to thee.’ How can we explain this carnival of cruelty? Theologically, the saints were of course imitating Christ, who saved the world by his suffering, so martyrdom in the primitive Church was prima facie evidence of sanctity. It was also one ...”

“... In May 2001, the French National Assembly passed a law, the Loi Taubira (named after Christiane Taubira, the Socialist deputy who sponsored the bill), recognising the Atlantic slave trade as a ‘crime against humanity’. France is, as a result, the only country in the world that has condemned slavery in the name of human rights ...”

“... difference. On her deathbed, she bequeathed her letters to the British Museum, ‘that the world may know he loved me once’. There’s an element of revenge in Nayder’s treatment of Dickens. ‘This book forces him to the margins,’ she says. The problem is that Catherine is such an unwilling ally in her project. After her marriage, she seems to have ...”

“... named her whole project after it, and gave a fine example of what she means by it and how it may be arrived at when The Happiness Project went straight to the top ten in the US bestseller list:* ‘I’m in shock. I just found out. My book, The Happiness Project, hit #2 on the New York Times bestseller list, its first week out in the world. This is one ...”

“... the book itself is never far from cuteness – more Adrian Mole than Ivan Denisovich – which may explain the endorsements of Room provided by sentimental popular novelists like Anita Shreve and Audrey Niffenegger. Where is Mark Haddon’s imprimatur? And of course, a novel narrated by a five-year-old kid stretches to breaking point the already uneasy ...”

“... Orleans, to Paris, where they confounded naturalists for several decades. A contemporary reader may guess, correctly, that the bones belonged to a species of animal that had long since ceased to exist – in fact, they came from the Mammut americanum, the American mastodon – but at the time such an imaginative leap would have been very difficult, because ...”

“... sways with grief ‘like a stalk of grass in the wind’ and ends by saying: ‘Oh, we writers may think we invent too much – but reality is worse every time!’ He’s not saying that invention is superfluous, just that there is no upper limit of grotesqueness to what happens every day. It isn’t unusual that a writer should be drawn to another ...”

“... of Picasso’s Party Line question that matters, but rather the suspicion that Matisse’s answer may be, though he hardly knows it, the whole truth. Decoration without somewhere to decorate – applied art without a realm of pleasure or praxis to apply to – such is modernism’s ‘Why not?’ The problem that follows for the critic is not to decide ...”

“... empires – Russia past, US present and China future – will be purely economic. Political Islam may be a threat, but jihadi militance is likely to pose more of a problem for the local regimes than for the three outside powers. Indeed, the potential threat from political Islam is more likely to lead to co-operation than conflict among the big three since ...”

“... of better governance in some areas. Jonathan’s supporters claim that if he wins a second term he may be able finally to tackle the long-standing corruption and political sclerosis that has damaged the country – the legacy of imperialism, dictatorship and the fight for the spoils of oil. But for all the talk of a booming middle class, and a surge in ...”

“... student will one day explain why. Perhaps it has to do with a certain English stiffness, which may be one reason it is rare in the United States. The English don’t like being on first-name terms with strangers, which is what authors and readers generally are to each other. It may also have to do with the doctrine of ...”

“... witnesses. A local curate called them ‘poor needy fellows of small or noe credit & such as … may be easily drawne to depose an untruth’. Tanner, meanwhile, was recast as a man who ‘well performed his worke with care’ and ‘such a one as is to be beleved upon his oath’. Alexandra Shepard has created a historical framework to help us grasp the ...”

“... times further out than Neptune.1 This isn’t the first time that astronomers have believed there may be nine planets in the solar system. From its discovery in 1930 until 2006, Pluto – smaller than our moon, and nearly forty times as far from the Sun as the Earth is – was considered the ninth. And between 1859 and 1915 it was widely believed, for ...”