“... ideas about nonsense],it became clear that one central point of resemblance between them lay in their willingness to characterise discourse about God as nonsensical – more specifically their willingness to take as a touchstone of theological insight the awareness that language was essentially incapable of putting us in touch with the reality of ...”

“... doctrine and the teachings of Jesus Christ’ and in his sympathy for blacklisted celebrities like Paul Robeson, who ‘got a shitty deal’.) If it were merely a matter of Matthiessen’s reputation as a writer, such explanations might have sufficed, but soon after his arrival in France, he made some new friends, and they started the Paris Review. Since ...”

“... so I’ve decided to stop being one. After a while we got his new business card: Lanchester Jean-Paul Monet. You’re getting more French, we said, but you can’t speak French. I’m working on it, he said: the key lifestyle decision is the name change. You have to call me ‘Lanchester’ now. What with work, Arthur, the gym, the shooting classes and ...”

“... wood was stored; Maurice Duplay, who owned the house, was a master-carpenter. In this courtyard, Paul Barras saw two generals of the Republic picking over the salad herbs for dinner, under the eye of Madame Duplay. Robespierre lived on the first floor, in a low-ceilinged room with the plainest of furnishings.The historian François Furet tells us: ‘The ...”

“... to or are cowed by them.Close to the end of White Skin, Black Fuel, Malm and the collective lay out a helpful taxonomy of denial: if outright denial is currently a fringe position, many of us – and more so our governments – live in a state of ‘implicatory denial’. The CEO of Norway’s state-owned oil company has declared Norwegian oil ‘the ...”

“... five years had seen the Commodore recordings of Coleman Hawkins and Chu Berry and a year ahead lay Gillespie’s ‘Groovin’ High’ and ‘Dizzy Atmosphere’. In the same way, an affecting review of Shoeshine, in 1947, turns in its second part to lament that, after a promising start in this film and Open City and Paisan, the new spirit of the Italian ...”

“... a wall down here, doors falling from hinges there, prisoners shaved for execution. Posterity can lay the blame on Syria’s modern rulers: the French, who between 1920 and 1946 cleared acres of labyrinthine quarters to make room for cannon and tanks to control the natives; the few elected and many military regimes who succeeded them; and, latterly, the Baath ...”

“... ownership of capital by one class, and of little or nothing but its labour power by another. Paul Krugman, discussing Roubini’s book in the New York Review of Books, agreed with him that what Ben Bernanke called the ‘global savings glut’ lay at the heart of the crisis, behind the proximate follies of ...”

“... years; and why American audiences flocked to see it in some places (Boston, Cleveland, Houston, St Paul, Omaha) but not in others (Los Angeles, Chicago, New York). It also caused great division among critics. The film cost more than $300,000 to make, and lost more than half that amount. Although Browning’s career never recovered from it, his reputation has ...”

“... song dear to members of the Land League, partly perhaps because Charles Stewart Parnell’s estate lay in the Vale of Avoca, a stone’s throw from the confluence. The song eventually died out of the popular and school repertoires in Britain, though I am not sure when. Through the 1920s it was still being advertised by publishers, with great regularity, but ...”

“... that appears as an appendix to The Man Who Lived Underground and describes the experiences that lay behind the novel. The first – an encounter with the ‘strangely familiar’ – took place in Chicago, shortly before his grandmother’s death in 1934. Wright thought he had ‘swept my life clean … of the religious influences of my ...”

“... to have got food and water from their captors by singing his songs. Frogs suggests that his magic lay, at least partly, in emotionalism coupled with a new use of the fictional female voice. Bronze Age Greece could not escape Cretan sea-power, and classical Athenians could not escape Cretan myth and its effect on Greece. In Euripides, the boat carrying Phaedra ...”

“... the ‘new realism’, even if she questioned its basis in reality: its force, she suspected, lay in its appeal to an ‘ordinary’ Dutch person, steeped in native common sense, whose worries had been ignored for years by left-liberal elites. In the UK too, there were ‘new realist’ voices, led by Trevor Phillips, chair of the Equality and Human ...”

“... ambition that stamped the Frühromantik – the ambience of the Schlegels, Novalis, Jean Paul, Tieck, Fichte, Schleiermacher, with Hölderlin and Kleist off-stage – made it an explosive force far beyond the sentimental reach of the Lake Poets or the vaticinations of Hugo: a starburst that could never be repeated or forgotten, as its consequences ...”

“... The abyss of history​ is deep enough to hold us all,’ Paul Valéry wrote in 1919, as Europe lay in ruins. The words resonate today as the coronavirus blows the roof off the world, most brutally exposing Britain and the United States, these prime movers of modern civilisation, which proudly claimed victory in two world wars, and in the Cold War, and which until recently held themselves up as exemplars of enlightened progress, economic and cultural models to be imitated across the globe ...”