“... denounce you as the Antichrist,’ he shouted, in the European Parliament, at Pope John Paul II. ‘Harlot’ was also a favourite, but this was rarely applied to an actual woman, being reserved for the Church of Rome. The same applied to ‘whore’, as in, ‘of Babylon’. The purity, in this uncracked patriarchy, of their own women, was a ...”

“... most notorious character) carries on two affairs, one with a girl, Lauren, the other with a boy, Paul. He obsesses over the former but never acknowledges the latter – even though we get the affair in lavish detail from Paul’s point of view. When you read it now, you see Ellis beginning to experiment with the narrative ...”

“... in some way, as both have teaching jobs at the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, just north of LA. So they meet, they fall in love, they move in together – and immediately, their hilltop love nest has to double as a family home, ‘abundant and containing’, for Harry’s three-year-old son. A couple of years later and they are joined by ...”

“... history at $3.7 billion overall. More than a hundred million dollars was spent on the 2014 North Carolina Senate race alone. And as the amount of money required to win an election increases, politicians are forced to spend more time raising it – by most estimates from a third to half of their working hours. Once that would have seemed incredible, but ...”

“... When they say they don’t care about their lives, you have to take out their families.’ Rand Paul (responding at a Republican debate): ‘If you are going to kill the families of terrorists, realise that there’s something called the Geneva Convention we’re going to have to pull out of.’The Mathematically Precise Trump has tweeted that homicide ...”

“... were invited to join Unit One, a group of painters, sculptors and architects brought together by Paul Nash to stand for ‘a truly contemporary spirit’ that would, he wrote in the Times, definitively bring together abstraction and Surrealism. But Maclean suggests that the decade’s innovation had already begun with the pink alabaster of Hepworth’s ...”

“... in public relations for the military, specialising in the missile detection radar that promised North Americans they’d have a good fifteen minutes of warning before any nuclear attack. He took sick leave for depression and had panic attacks; he had been hospitalised, and reported regularly for electroshock therapy years after his release. His mother also ...”

“... of the creatures looked like monkeys, some like octopi, some like bunches of grapes.’A little north of the equator, and just west of the International Dateline, Micronesia sits between China, the US and Australia. Pohnpei is 5000 km from Hawaii, 4000 km from Taipei and 3000 km from the Australian city of Cairns. The UN created eleven trust territories ...”

“... which eclipses all the paintings he has seen. On paying a visit to Monet’s water lilies at Paul Durand-Ruel’s gallery, he has a ‘terrible urge to walk out’. He couldn’t stand Cézanne. In Vallotton’s work at the 1904 Salon d’Automne he finds ‘the petty dreariness of an upholsterer’. Although Vallotton, like Lautrec and ...”

“... Senderista cult. One might have expected Shakespeare to draw on the examples of Conrad, Greene or Paul Theroux for his fantasia on violence and evil at the headwaters of the Amazonian jungle. Instead he borrows the fluid, elliptic techniques of Latin Americans such as Fuentes, Marquez and – above all – Llosa. The Vision of Elena Silves seems in one of its ...”

“... is following in the footsteps of Schopenhauer and of Wagner’s polemic against the conductor Paul Devrient (the topic of the essay itself was suggested to Nietzsche by Cosima Wagner). True, Strauss’s book is vulgar and boring, and Professor Herbert Golder says so more than once in his introduction to Nietzsche’s essay: what he doesn’t say ...”

“... family hark back to Cherokee Indians. Andrew Presley, a Scottish blacksmith, emigrated to North Carolina in the middle of the 18th century. His son fought in the Wars of Independence and finally settled in the district of Tupelo, Mississippi, where Elvis Aaron was born 150 years later. Elvis and Gladys promises much it cannot deliver, nestling ...”

“... into the Near East, or of ‘Romanisation’ into Western and Central Europe and North Africa. Some understanding of the technology of production, including that of agriculture (the economic predominance of which, obvious and banal as it is, provides another of the parrot-cries of contemporary thought on ancient society), is essential if one ...”

“... colleague Mervyn Storey complained that the signs at the most popular tourist attraction in his North Antrim constituency, the Giant’s Causeway, misinformed the public by telling them that the rock formation was 550 million years old. Despite such stories it would be a great mistake to pigeonhole Unionists as parochial know-nothings. Revisionist ...”

“... intractable combination of high unemployment and inflation – of 1973-75. The MIT economist Paul Samuelson, whose 1948 textbook set the Keynesian standard, was sufficiently rattled to admit to the ‘failure of any paradigm to deliver the goods’. The calls for the reform, as opposed to the destruction, of the welfare state came from within it. But ...”