“... in love is one that I haven’t written about nearly as much as I want to.’ Though this book may seem to be another attempt at it, she prefers to talk around her subject, linking her stories through something slightly different. ‘What on earth is this feeling that somehow things have to connect or . . . have to be part of a larger whole?’ she asked ...”

“... Francis Ravaillac and Charlotte Cordé’ consists of nine-line stanzas rhymed ababcdcdD. Shelley may have invented this form, his editors suggest, because he could not yet cope ‘with composing in the more complexly rhymed Spenserian stanza (ababbcbcC)’. Though his imagery tends to be trite, Shelley did pretty well with the rhythm of his invented ...”

“... Kimmer’s deep vulgarity is clear from the start, when she phones Talcott with the news that she may be nominated to the Federal bench: ‘This is the happiest day of my life,’ burbles my wife of nearly nine years on what will shortly become one of the saddest days of mine. ‘I see,’ I answer, my tone conveying my hurt. ‘Oh, Misha, grow up. I’m ...”

“... theme, to the same awful convent school that Antonia White attended and wrote about in Frost in May. Vicious nuns, a minimal education for middle-class marriage and – something, at least – a powerful enemy to kick against. As an adult she would spit on the street if she saw nuns. Earlier, she had a more sophisticated mode of expression. ‘I’m so ...”

“... You hold in your hands the first great 19th-century novel of the 21st century. In my 25 years this may be the most magnificent, courageous novel I have ever published. Magnificent because it can only be called a great novel, a tour de force, a novel that truly stands beside the Victorian classics.’ Admirers of Fingersmith might contest these ...”

“... Whether or not Musa has been healed by Jesus is an open question. Musa believes he has, but it may be a coincidence: this is hardly evidence-based medicine. And even if Jesus is responsible, it needn’t be a miracle; the water and chest compression may have helped – in a godless, biological, rationally explicable ...”

“... not to see these writings as valedictory – a round-up of Sontag’s thought and work. We may know that death is always an arbitrary interruption of a life, but with us here and her not, and our narrative-hungry brains being what they are, we bind death to life by assuming a summation rather than allowing life to spill pointlessly over the edge into ...”

“... written an excellent study of Lloyd George in opposition, is well aware of all this: indeed, it may have been out of a scrupulous wish not to revisit fields already ploughed that he pays so little mind to it here. Yet, however intended, this was a poor choice. In the thirty years since Campbell’s earlier book, Lloyd George has become something less than a ...”

“... where he remained until he resigned on grounds of ill-health in 1922. He died in 1924. We may not believe, as we are told in the preface to The Office Writings, a selection from his legal and clerical work, that ‘much of Kafka’s greatness . . . is owed to his office job,’ but we can certainly agree that anything we learn about his job will ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... driving force behind his burlesque of the Dunciad, which survives only in manuscript draft. (It may be that this particular satire, like the slightly later Epistle to Mr Lyttleton, remained unpublished because of his discomfort with having to display such virulent hostility towards Pope – a writer he elsewhere calls ‘the greatest Poet of his ...”

“... It’s not that the politics don’t make a difference. They make all the difference. But they may be the only difference there is to make, and the sheer intensity of the parallel investment in writing becomes all the more troubling. Literature on both sides – there probably isn’t any literature in the centre, at least in Bolaño’s view – is ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”