“... It’s a good time to be a Muslim writing about ‘the trouble with Islam’, to borrow the title of a recent jeremiad by Irshad Manji, a Pakistani-Canadian lesbian feminist. Readers in the West, especially Americans, are eager to know ‘what went wrong with Islam’, as Bernard Lewis delicately puts it, particularly if it can be traced to cultural pathology and envy of ‘our freedom ...”

“... they fail to provide the important background information that, to quote an authoritative study by John Garver, Nehru had previously ‘ordered Indian forces to advance into disputed areas and clear Chinese forces, though without firing first. India ignored Chinese warnings to halt this “forward policy”,’ and only then did the Red Army strike ‘suddenly ...”

“... seedy urban living to replace the laboured machinery of detection. The kind of murder mystery that John Peacock unravels in Attard in Retirement could in principle have been offered at any time since radio began – though Peacock, a workmanlike writer, scatters Smileyesque detail about, presumably to reassure the listener that he has not really been wasting ...”

“... A Quaker delegation visited Nicholas I at St Petersburg in an attempt to prevent the Crimean War. John Bright opposed that war in his greatest speeches, but he was clearly not a pacifist: he supported the armed suppression of the Indian Mutiny and applauded the Union victory in the American Civil War. With Great Britain not involved in a European war for ...”

“... atrocity to atrocity, in one of their series of imaginary conversations, the Noctes Ambrosianae. John Wilson (‘Christopher North’) appears to have been responsible for the horribly inflammatory discussion of the subject there, and to have scripted the contributions assigned to the Ettrick Shepherd, James Hogg. One scholar has asserted that the imaginary ...”

“... by the outstanding writers associated with it, such as Robert Penn Warren (All the King’s Men), John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, even Robert Lowell, who literally pitched his tent on Tate’s lawn. All of these must have responded warmly to Robert Frost’s patriotic poem ‘The Gift Outright’: ours before we were the land’s. She was our land more than a ...”

“... while being reproached by more decisive, or more outraged, comrades such as Edward Thompson and John Saville, who left to establish an independent journal. But in the spring of 1957 he accepted the inevitable and left the party.It can be hard now to recover what a volcanic existential crisis this was for those, like Hill, whose lives had for so long been ...”

“... may prefer Marguerite Porete, burning alive with her book, or the rich black intersection of St John of the Cross or the pyroclastic whisper of Anonymous, Unknown Author. Or something a little closer to home – Jeannie, for instance, the family friend whom my father (a Catholic priest in full cassock) calls simply a Eucharistic mystic, so guilelessly, and ...”

“... So we were fed with Swedish folk music, Italian arias, French chansons, German schmaltz and John Philip Sousa. Not so bad actually, because if you put all that together, it becomes what you can hear – well, some of it – on Abba records.To this hodgepodge, known as schlager in its mass-produced pop form, Abba added the Anglo-American songbook ...”

“... the interests and weaknesses of others. In Lucina’s Rape, Rochester’s adaptation of John Fletcher’s tragedy Valentinian (c.1610-14), Marcellina, a lady in waiting, shows her worldliness by parroting typical male arguments against women’s chastity: ‘This Honour is the veriest Mountebanke … what a cheate must that bee/Which robbs our lives ...”

“... all who promoted evil in this country.’ We were at Mar-a-Lago for the premiere of a film about John Eastman, one of the lawyers who tried to overturn the 2020 election results. Buses were bringing in guests from the Hilton West Palm Beach; ‘red-carpet opportunities’ with Rudy Giuliani had been advertised. The film came out on the anniversary of the ...”

“... the manifestation of his mental life. A cabinet of curiosities, a mind museum as much as Sir John Soane’s, it tells the story of a life and a century. It partially answers the question of what Ede was by a demonstration of his ‘eye for the invisible’, as he put it, and what might be described as his form of synaesthesia. He spoke of understanding ...”

“... Second-Class Citizen brought her an American publisher, George Braziller, followed by praise from John Updike in the New Yorker and offers to write for TV: her dream of buying a house was within reach. And an appearance on a panel organised by the Women’s International League in June 1975 made her name as a feminist, even if she claimed in her autobiography ...”

“... a crowd at St Paul’s Cathedral like a captured king. There it was the subject of a sermon by John Hilsey, bishop of Rochester, who denounced the ‘great adolatrie’ of the monks of Boxley and the ‘abuses … of engines’ before encouraging his audience to break the Rood into pieces and burn it.How much of this context can be applied to the ...”

“... share with fairy tales what Angela Carter described as an ‘unperplexedness’, later glossed by John Bayley as meaning that the story ‘knows what it is doing and where it is going, but neither knows nor cares what it means’. This is quick-fire fiction: the telling of the tale is all, and it should be as fast and efficient as possible. ‘When I started ...”