“... she could not guess and would never know, for at that moment the wave fell upon her and she saw no more. The first section of the novel is an astonishingly sustained piece of hallucinatory writing, and the distance between the reader and the world of myth is not unlike what it would be were the action taking place underwater, in slow motion, silent – the ...”

“... without fanfare. As yet, few have picked up on an analysis by the New York University economist Thomas Philippon of the history of the unit cost of financial intermediation. The unit cost is a measure of the efficiency of the financial system, and Philippon tracks its level in the United States since 1884, the time of pens and paper ledgers, when a ...”

“... or, if seen as half-horse, hooves, not feet, gelatinous from jigging on that heat, and they dance more featly, fleeter, faster because their dancefloor’s on the site of a disaster. Does their acrobatic goat/horse/man gavotte come from the ground they jig on being hot? All I’m suggesting is we might enquire if the dancing is dependent on the ...”

“... System, was developed by the American military. The US Department of Defence currently spends more than a billion dollars a year maintaining it. There are 31 GPS satellites orbiting the earth, all monitored, along with hundreds of other military satellites, from Schriever Air Force Base in Colorado. For the system to work, a receiver on the ground ...”

“... At one point in Thomas Peacock’s satire Melincourt, the heroine Anthelia offers a spirited sketch of the character traits which she looks for in a prospective husband. ‘I would require him to be free in all his thoughts, true in all his words, generous in all his actions – ardent in friendship, enthusiastic in love, disinterested in both … the champion of the feeble, the firm opponent of the powerful oppressor – not to be enervated by luxury, nor corrupted by avarice, nor intimidated by tyranny, nor enthralled by superstition – more desirous to distribute wealth than to possess it, to disseminate liberty than to appropriate power, to cheer the heart of sorrow than to dazzle the eyes of folly ...”

“... His notice in the Victorian DNB was a scant 700 words; in the new DNB it has ballooned to more than 8000. Now he has been canonised by the publication of an Oxford edition of his complete works, the second complete works in a century, more than have been accorded either Hobbes or Locke. The story of Winstanley’s ...”

“... dainty, ladylike endeavours involving pills and gas stoves and other hushed methods, became more assertive and noisome – pistols first, then shotguns. The silence was broken. In some odd quarters, this was counted as progress. A traditionalist in most matters of life, my mother was, nonetheless, ahead of her time when it came to death, dying three ...”

“... she can’t have been unaware that this is exactly how drugs are smuggled into prison. Merrilyn Thomas’s book concerns the work of Clive Stafford-Smith and the Southern Prisoners Defence Committee. Born in Newmarket, educated at Radley and another Cambridge reject, Stafford-Smith went on a scholarship to the University of North Carolina at Chapel ...”

“... without falling prey to a barbarous irrationalism? It is a problem that haunts the pages of Thomas Mann – another refugee from Hitler – for whose Doctor Faustus Adorno acted as musicological adviser. In fact, Modernism in general is shot through with a desire for some solid truth while at the same time mourning its elusiveness. Modernist culture of ...”

“... was a flourishing Anglo-Saxon kingdom, met its end on 30 January 1540, one of the last of the more than eight hundred English religious houses closed over the previous decade and a half. The final day of monastic life at Evesham witnessed the standard process of surrender by which Henry VIII’s government took possession of these ancient and supposedly ...”

“... It seems to me that nothing approaching the truth has yet been said on this subject,’ Thomas Nagel says in the middle of this complex, wide-ranging and very interesting book; and he says it at the end of a chapter (on the freedom of the will) not, as some other philosophers might, at the beginning. The book argues in a determined way about the largest philosophical questions: the nature of reality, the possibility of knowledge, freedom, morality, the meaning of life ...”

“... basket in the bulrushes, the parting of the Red Sea – all recur insistently, though Esther is more troubled by the image of ‘the Hebrews leaving Egypt, Pharaoh’s army at their heels’, which she thinks will be the islanders’ fate (‘Pharaoh will come after us, like he always does’). Before Paradise is lost, a sinuous rhythm evokes Apple ...”

“... in 1575, she and her entourage probably admired his collection of ‘Turkish’ carpets; he owned more than eighty, including ‘a great fine carpet ofturkey makinge of orient colours’, ‘a greate turky carpet with grene wrethes & flowers of white and blewe’ and ‘a percian [Persian] carpet lyke turkye worke’. In Holbein’s great mural for Whitehall ...”

“... new ranks of social scientists calculated the consequences of a rapidly changing French society. Thomas Kselman, in this superb new book, notes the paradox: hard facts about deadly disorders both heightened fears and raised hopes that solutions would follow. Government officials tackled problems of public hygiene, doctors formed professional organisations ...”

“... to exterminate than to encourage’ them. In a penitential composed around 1216, the theologian Thomas Chobham complained about contortionists, professional flatterers and musicians who went to drinking establishments and inflamed their listeners with obscene songs. (He was kinder to entertainers who sang of saints and princes and comforted the sad and the ...”