“... court record. Benedict XVI recently advised that ‘hers is a beautiful example of holiness for lay people involved in politics, especially in difficult situations. Faith is the light that guided all her choices.’ He wouldn’t warm to all the company who gather round her standard: just as socialists, feminists and liberal Catholics rallied to her as the ...”

“... suggests that the true value of the option (and therefore of the taxpayer subsidy) for 2010 lay between £30 billion and £120 billion. There’s nothing specific to the UK about the subsidy, other than its size relative to the UK economy, which results from the fact that our banks are very large; two of the biggest, Lloyds and the Royal Bank of ...”

“... choose clear-cut positions intellectually or politically because the dilemma of irresolution lay within his own personality.’ Resolution was to be achieved only by writing and more writing; the regular thudding of his typewriter keys was the rhythm to which Williams marched. Along the way, Smith’s narrative throws some incidental light on the ...”

“... was family legend that his great-grandmother Nettie had Ojibwe blood, and over time Purdy came to lay more stress on that suppositious heritage. His antisemitism, though, more than kept pace with this sense of pride in First Nation ancestry. Gordon Lish, an admirer whose principles as an editor were influenced by the example of Purdy’s style, grew tired of ...”

“... attribution to Charlotte’s Belgian teacher, Constantin Héger, is laughable: it’s signed ‘Paul Hegér’ (Paul Emmanuel, a character with strong affinities to Héger, is the love-interest in Villette). The date given is 1850; Charlotte left Brussels in 1844. The accent is in the wrong place: Hegér not Héger. It ...”

“... It was in this very lack of developed ideas that, when it reached the West, its limitation lay. ‘Sadly,’ Ghervas writes, ‘the spirit of enlarged Europe was never able to revive the postwar European spirit.’ Nor did it reach the western Balkans. There its opposite prevailed, the Spirit of Lyssa, goddess of anger, as Yugoslavia broke up and its ...”

“... Saint-Alban had become a sanctuary for partisans and left-wing intellectuals, including the poet Paul Eluard and the historian of science Georges Canguilhem. Tosquelles pioneered ‘institutional’ or ‘social’ therapy, which tried to turn the hospital into a recognisable microcosm of the world outside. The idea underlying social therapy – and ...”

“... the March, no more than the typical reader of contemporary newspapers, and his immediate interest lay elsewhere. He had come to work in the library at Rimini, which was noted for its trove of manuscripts and archival material relating to Sigismondo Malatesta, who had ruled the city from 1430 to 1468 and sponsored the reconstruction of the church of San ...”

“... until the century’s second great catastrophe. This is not the common view. The title alone of Paul Fussell’s enormously influential The Great War and Modern Memory (1975), for example, proclaims the contrary. So does the concluding line – ‘Never such innocence again’ – of Philip Larkin’s 1960 poem ‘MCMXIV’, invoking the summer haze, the ...”

“... had found a job which involved driving. It was always a story about permission or control that lay within the purview of somebody else. In America, individualism itself was over time accommodated to the corporate age, an effort captured very naturally in Herbert Hoover’s 1922 treatise, American Individualism. In no time at all Emerson’s ‘natural ...”

“... Pierre Louÿs, Mata Hari and Comte Robert de Montesquiou, to Gide, Colette, Rémy de Gourmont, Paul Valéry, Sacha Guitry, Salomon Reinach and the buxom brunette diva Emma Calvé. (It was de Gourmont who nicknamed Barney ‘L’Amazone’, the monicker under which she would publish three books of flowery autobiographical pensées.) She also bagged the ...”

“... of whether (and with whom) they should be allowed to have children. His well-intentioned use of ‘lay analysts’ lacking a medical degree (as was the case with Fromm) degenerated into a system of dangling traineeships in front of favoured followers with no psychiatric knowledge and no understanding of the ethical dimensions of what they were being taught to ...”

“... anniversary of Chesterton’s death, Cardinal Emmett Carter described him as one of the ‘holy lay persons’ who have exercised a prophetic role within the Church and the world. Though the cardinal was hesitant, the Chesterton Review wondered whether there might be grounds for canonisation, given the ‘special integrity and blamelessness about him, a ...”

“... nationalists during the independence struggle. A separate French protest was signed by Jean-Paul Sartre and Louis Aragon.The king and his advisers took the view that Morocco must forge its own post-independence path. Why should left-leaning states in the Third World and ex-colonial powers, harping on the rights they had denied in the past, tell Hassan ...”

“... Yeltsin. The meetings went on like this for several days. We talked about Deconstruction, about Paul de Man, about ideological subversion and containment, about principles of selection and rejection, about the fortunes of systematic Marxist literary criticism, and so forth. There were some moments of illumination, but often the American editors seemed to be ...”