“... Evening, 10 May 1987. Thousands of American fingers flick their television remotes to Old Time Gospel Hour. The Reverend Jerry Falwell steps forward to address an adoring audience, worn Bibles in hand, blessed suppers of body and blood recently consumed. His message is a comforting one for this gathering. ‘They are scared to walk near one of their own kind right now ...”

“... he had previously tried a rabies vaccine on two patients, a man named Girard, who recovered but may not have had rabies, and a girl named Julie-Antoinette Poughon, who died. For another, Pasteur ‘had never tried, not even once, to cure symptomatic rabies in animals by any method before he decided to treat Girard’. He began animal experiments a few days ...”

“... In Ashes to Ashes, a character called Rebecca tells another character called Devlin, who may be her husband, about the man who may be (or may have been) her lover. He did work for a travel agency. He was a guide. He used to go to the local railway station and walk down the ...”

“... to Nathaniel Haynes’s History of the Disciples of Christ in Illinois (Cincinnati, 1915). And he may be the only 20th-century reader of The Biography of Elder Brown Warren Stone written by himself, with Additions and Reflections by Elder John Rogers (Cincinnati, 1847). He describes the way you could make out the shape of his uncle’s toes through the ...”

“... light, steadfast in serene strength like a god’. Such personifications, all positive and happy, may seem too soft-focused. Sometimes the rhapsodies cloy: ‘Glaciers came down from heaven, and they were angels with folded wings, white wings of snowy bloom. Locked hand in hand the little spirits did nobly’ (letter of 1871 to Mrs Carr). Or again, from his ...”

“... I spent ten days in May in Russia on a visit arranged by the Great Britain-USSR Society. My colleagues were the novelists Paul Bailey, Christopher Hope and Timothy Mo (who also writes for Boxing News), the poet Craig Raine (who doesn’t) and the playwright Sue Townsend of Adrian Mole fame. I had many misgivings about the trip, particularly in regard to creature comforts ...”

“... May you live in interesting times!’ This most deadly of Chinese curses must be sounding in the minds of the people of Hong Kong as the territory creeps inexorably towards 30 June 1997, and its handing-back to Communist China. Ever since 1982, when Margaret Thatcher travelled to the Middle Kingdom to set the whole 1997 question alight, Hong Kong has been living through interesting – that is to say, difficult – times ...”

“... Sorel was standard nonsense among professors of history and politics hostile to the New Left: one may search in vain for any favourable reference to Sorel in New Left ideology.’) I had also been National Organiser for the Youth Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, extending our concerns to a campaign against the use of napalm. I had stood for the Greater ...”

“... Hugh Dalton observed that no good book ever got written between division bells. Crosland may have benefited from an enforced sabbatical. The Future of Socialism is not an academic study, however. The energy it conveys comes from the sense of its author as somebody recently bloodied in battle, waiting for the next push. Nor should Crosland be seen as ...”

“... has developed, beginning with the founding Constitution and the Bill of Rights, the form of which may have been influenced by the 1729 English translation of the Tractatus that was in Benjamin Franklin’s library, a collection used for reference by the framers of the Constitution. Spinoza’s prospectus for a post-Jewish and post-Christian world was part of ...”

“... forty years ago, Achebe has spoken and written so incessantly about his life and work that we may well feel that he has already done the work of the biographer. Should he now decide to publish his memoirs or autobiography all they could add to our knowledge of him and his cultural background would be some intimate revelations about those fluctuations of ...”

“... Put on the kettle and make the tay, and if they weren’t happy, that you may. By the time he wrote this, O’Malley knew all about post-revolutionary disillusionment. He went on to produce a sequel, The Singing Flame, which is less accomplished but possesses much of the same drive and power. Always a stringent self-critic, he ...”

“... up. I did not expect to be more than bored, but found myself extremely moved almost at once. You may believe that what is being celebrated will turn out a delusion, but history is full of gloomy afterthoughts. Here you have celebrated a victory of revolt against tyrants, supported by the countryside alone, practically with their bare hands, against a ...”

“... Hill attest to a strong left-wing strain in Iowa’s politics which has been influential and may be so again. They worry about health, education, environment, with the recognisable language and manner of Labour Party activists. One guest of the Hatches, Nancy Stillians, is preoccupied with campaign finance reform, and tells me ideally she would vote for ...”

“... he put up no resistance. Instead, he presided over the demise of his principal political ally in May 1966. Did he think this was the price to be paid for remaining Mao’s heir apparent? Or was it simply the disciplined behaviour of the ultimate apparatchik? Did he experience no conflict of loyalty between the claims of the leader and the claims of the ...”