“... layer of the human mind, which constituted the vast reservoir of the German protest against Christian civilisation’. Ressentiment on this scale demands an object. The will whose triumph is bodied forth in Leni Riefenstahl’s camp classic found its pretext in the Versailles indemnities and the ‘stab in the back’ myth, but its real cause in the ...”

“... bully he is properly diffident, almost apologetic in his whimsical way. His man, Dthemetri, was a Christian from Zante (which was then part of the British Empire) and he had seen so much bullyng by the Muslims that it was hardly surprising that he should want to get his own back, with Kinglake’s authority behind him. Dthemetri was ‘in his sphere a true ...”

“... age.’ A sympathetic account of Cuvier makes an ideal introduction to Rupke’s reappraisal of William Buckland and the English School of Geology. For Rupke, too, is doing battle with the story that modern geology had its roots in the uniformitarianism of Hutton and Charles Lyell to the exclusion of the catastrophism of Cuvier and his English ...”

“... novel in the comic mode I was hoping to engage the interest and sympathy of non-Catholic and non-Christian readers as well, by presenting the ironies and absurdities of married life under the dispensation of the ‘Safe Method’ as one instance of the universal and perennial difficulty men and women experience in understanding, ordering and satisfying their ...”

“... Laura Curtis’s language strikes one as extravagant: she is importing a Romantic sublime or William Goldingesque apocalypticism into Defoe’s sober scene. Then what about the following? ‘In Chapter Two, I traced two tendencies in Robinson Crusoe and in A Journal of the Plague Year that conflict with Defoe’s compulsion to construct in his writing an ...”

“... And ten to wan the piper is a Cockney. By 1931 he was already proclaiming, in a letter to William Soutar, that he was not the man to write ‘bairn rhymes or re-popularise Scots’, though he still thought ‘re-vaccination of the children with it’ an excellent idea. Some difficult years – in personal matters – and a change of orientation in ...”

“... among others, by Sayre’s father, whose credits include Annie Oakley, Gunga Din and, with William Faulkner and Nunnally Johnson, The Road to Glory) merely intensified an already entrenched aversion to collaboration, censorship, interference. Only Johnson, Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett, among the New York circle, flourished as ...”

“... upon the sea coast, and in the vicinity of lagoons, low woods and swamps,’ the English surgeon William Lempriere said in his Popular Lectures of 1830, ‘and prove an unfailing source of discomfiture, pain and disfigurement.’ They bit and they bothered, but they didn’t factor in thinking about the causes of agues and fevers or any other human ...”

“... adopted the daring stance of separatism, joining those who denounced the Church of England as anti-Christian and worshipped outside it. His outspoken pamphlets in the late 1630s earned him a public whipping and an extended imprisonment from which, at the outset of the Long Parliament in 1640, ‘my old friend’ Cromwell secured his release. In the war the two ...”

“... to approach from the outside. (Just one example of this latter category: Sophie’s Choice, by William Styron, a book which seems wholly to justify its use of Auschwitz, even though Styron is not a Jew, let alone a survivor of the Holocaust.) Literature is not in the business of copyrighting certain themes for certain groups. And as for risk: the real ...”

“... as a quixotic attempt to write a novel without metaphor. (She had intended it to be governed by William Carlos Williams’s celebrated dictum: ‘no ideas but in things.’) The plan was evidently impossible, as the narrator of the novel repeatedly reflects: ‘even in the act of naming,’ she says at one point, ‘we make metaphors.’ It may well be that ...”

“... Sterne’s novel, where Corporal Trim, Uncle Toby’s manservant, reflects on the opinion of King William (his former commander) ‘that everything was predestined for us in this world; insomuch, that he would often say to his soldiers, that “every ball had its billet” ’ Jacques’s first words are to quote this, the time-honoured sentiment of the ...”

“... no one attends services. Muslims increasingly stood out as believers of a different religion in a Christian yet irreligious society. For many Norwegians, a stroll in parts of Oslo East became an unsettling experience. The sounds of Urdu and Arabic, the wearing of the hijab, even the smell of foreign food clashed with their idea of Norway. The country, many ...”

“... complain that I am speaking in a tone that is too frivolous for a divine or too biting for a Christian’ – and here Erasmus ends and Burton begins – ‘not I, but Democritus said it.’ Sterne was himself a divine who had been accused of speaking too lightly, of indulging in extravagant praise of folly, and his Burton-inspired defence is that ...”

“... argument about whether Mendès-France was a Communist or a socialist, Willard’s host (played by Christian Marquand, an old actor friend of Brando’s and the director of Candy) gives an eloquent explanation of why they must stay in this place where they are not wanted, where their time is plainly over. The place is ours, he says, we brought the rubber from ...”