“... and as Mazower argues: A world in which violations of human rights trump the sanctity of borders may turn out to produce more wars, more massacres and more instability. It may also be less law-abiding. If the history of the past century shows anything, it is that clear legal norms, the empowering of states and the securing ...”

“... of the issues which agitate modern Christians (usually, what people do with their genitals), it may come as a disappointment to learn that although Tametsi took up quite a bit of the council’s time in its last session, the aggro at Trent concerned an utterly different issue, which now sounds as if there really isn’t anything to argue about: whether or ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... playground for every conceivable intellectual, aesthetic, political and psychological tendency, it may or may not be regrettable, but it is hardly surprising. In view of all this heavy reading and even heavier theorising, and leaving aside his musical genius, the two most impressive things about the author of The Artwork of ...”

“... I need to bear witness to an uncertain event. I feel it roaring inside me – this thing that may not have taken place. I don’t even know what name to put on it. I think you might call it a crime of the flesh, but the flesh is long fallen away and I am not sure what hurt may linger in the bones. Liam was the victim ...”

“... and the story of a life especially is made up of assumptions, desires and fantasies about what may have happened or could have happened. Still, the reading public took Mahmoody’s book for fact, and it made life even more difficult for Iranian Americans. Her success started a trend in memoirs by Western women who have ‘survived’ the Middle East. In ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... this authorial decision, the texture of the writing becomes altogether less interesting, and this may be a reason why the novel seems to be, though only by the standards Ishiguro has set himself, a failure. I open it quite at random and read the first sentences to meet my eye: What with one thing and another, I didn’t get a chance to talk to Tommy for the ...”

“... of talks cannot be excluded. Disputes over territory between local people and outside rulers may be contained by war; they cannot be solved. Putin recognised this when he authorised one of his top generals to meet Maskhadov’s envoy three years ago. Although that encounter got nowhere, it established that negotiations are not unthinkable. Perhaps the ...”

“... going out on the town with an elusive companion called Gloria, whom Al is unable to see and who may or may not be real. Indeed, one of the book’s destabilising effects is to call into question what is real and what isn’t. Al’s world is populated by beings who are immaterial, yet exist: such as the little old lady ...”

“... is probably why her book does not attempt a full assessment of his abilities as a commander. It may be for the same reason that there is no serious exploration of the tension, which she has clearly observed, between divergent contemporary perceptions of him. On the one hand, he inspired the comment ‘an Englishman gone Italian is the devil ...”

“... or the loss of background information, are rebuked by John Hamilton: ‘Preposterous as it may sound, this book earnestly considers the possibility of Pindar’s obscurity’ – that is to say, deliberate obscurity. However, though Hamilton is not afraid to engage with Pindar, he is more concerned with more recent authors. When, for example, the ...”

“... his former comrades, coming and going, but can’t make out their conversation, strain as he may. Classical sources, such as Plutarch’s essay on the subject, were equally disapproving. The damaging associations of curiosity with magic, an arrogant desire to probe nature’s secrets in order to augment human power, persisted through the ...”

“... main narrative of Fever and Spear, for all the narrator’s insistence that ‘anything you say may be used against you,’ or his harping on the phrase ‘Keep quiet, then save yourself.’ The betrayal of Marías’s father by a friend in 1939, relayed here with minimal fictional disguise, is the grounds for building a monumental thesis on the belief that ...”

“... his celebrated warning that ‘the popular press is drinking in the last chance saloon.’ Mellor may have meant what he said, but he was certainly not speaking for the rest of the Government. As far as the majority of his colleagues were concerned the newspapers had not even walked through the saloon’s swing doors, and Calcutt was just a device to quell ...”