“... my life, and the hopeless flirtations with chance in roulette and dice don’t interest me. There may be a thrill to be had playing those games in Monte Carlo or Las Vegas, but it requires some suspension of disbelief to feel the glamour ‘doing your money’ amid the plastic fittings and bus-seat upholstery of a casino in Wolverhampton or the Edgware ...”

“... ways, Ober believes, Athens was the Google of the ancient world. And if this is true, then we may need to reconsider our other reservations about the democratic nature of the wisdom of crowds as well. Perhaps we are wrong to assume that democracy in the modern world can’t be much more than a popularity contest. And if so, perhaps we should also stop ...”

“... for quotations and for any material that is challenged or likely to be challenged, or the material may be removed. The proliferation of newspaper sources on the internet means that this is often the best place to look for new, verifiable source material (particularly if you are not too bothered about truth). Most of the information out there is recent ...”

“... bank, he smoked dope, his hair was messy. Why couldn’t they see he was on their side?Christodora may bear a (real) building’s name, but the book itself seems still to be in search of a principle of construction. Despite the prominence of the Christodora in the title and the opening passages, this isn’t one of those novels that represents a building as a ...”

“... the crisis in British (and indeed Western) society would be economic before it was political. It may yet turn out that way. For now, though, what has happened amounts to a collapse of our political system. The fact that the leadership of both main parties has disintegrated would under normal circumstances be a big story, but in the current chaos it is no ...”

“... oneself from the other people involved, or not without a traumatic, perhaps fatal break. This may seem a strange preamble to a consideration of the work of Natalia Ginzburg, a writer sometimes criticised in Italy for having restricted her comments on the highly influential, privileged and politicised peer group she lived among to accounts of their ...”

“... is where the shame of nakedness landed and got stuck. The castrated horror that is the female form may provoke man’s impulse to point, jeer or debase but, as a psychoanalytical parable, it feels reductive here. In English, ‘shame’ indicates a kind of feeling bad: ostensibly about what you have done, but possibly about what you are. ‘Toxic shame’ is a ...”

“... their convictions, all but one were quickly amnestied by the Paris government. Its attitude may have been influenced by the fact that the French army had carried out many more recent mass killings of civilians in the course of suppressing revolts in Algeria (1945) and Madagascar (1947), and was even then committing massacres in Indochina, still a French ...”

“... book is already extreme. In any case, it’s a possibility that isn’t floated, and the reason may be that the narrator, despite any amount of helpless love, has no reason to trust his mother. There hasn’t been a first-person narrator in a McEwan novel since Enduring Love in 1997 (and before that only in his first, The Cement Garden, 1978, and then in ...”

“... stalking. Petrarch gives some precise-seeming pointers to the identity of Laura, though even they may only be another layer of the mordantly playful mythologising which is one aspect of the Canzoniere. The best-known source of biographical clues is a handwritten inscription on the flyleaf of the ‘Ambrosian Virgil’, Petrarch’s cherished and much ...”

“... outpaced the German invasion, getting the last train out of Paris. They stayed in Marseille until May 1942, when they left for New York via Casablanca. In Marseille, Simone decided to work as a farmhand. She also asked Thibon, who had reluctantly agreed that she could work on his farm, to let her sleep outside, which he absolutely refused to do. In the end ...”

“... misleading impression that it was easy to accuse someone of witchcraft on flimsy pretexts, which may have been true during severe panics but usually was not. Persistent doubt throughout the early modern period explains both the relative rarity of prosecutions – around 100,000 across an entire continent and three centuries is not that many – and the high ...”

“... by a mountain of a man dressed in a jellaba. He tells me to hurry up the stairs – the briefing may already have started. Upstairs is a large room with whitewashed walls and grey carpet tiles. On one of the walls a banner proclaims that there is no God but God. A panel of young, bearded men are sitting under the banner, facing a semi-circular swathe of TV ...”

“... of the jubilation surrounding Blair’s arrival in Downing Street, however forced much of that may have been. The election campaign itself was in part responsible for the absence of excitement. Avoiding any sharp challenges or radical commitments, Gerhard Schröder promised no more than a reformist modicum, under the slogan ‘We don’t want to change ...”

“... by this jerky robot whose various attachments include A large hook for turning over corpses that may be booby-trapped; But I still have this picture of his hands held up to avert the future In a final act of no surrender, as, twisting through the murky fathoms Of what might have been, he is washed ashore as pearl and coral. This strange eruption to our state ...”