“... lord will one day be known as the god of war,’ and that the pact between God and men may amount only to ‘two articles, namely, you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours.’ Satan, in a bitter recasting of his characterisation in The Gospel according to Jesus Christ, ‘is just another instrument of the lord, the one who does the dirty work ...”

“... articles censored, a cinema club closed down, a programme of debates banned. Now he thinks things may be looking up. He believes that what the regime most fears is a Tahrir Square, the idea of a public forum, an agora. ‘The Arab revolutions,’ he said, ‘were about men and women reclaiming public space in the heart of their capital cities.’ But what was ...”

“... family gatherings. Conversation in the street and outside the schools is fretful, but general. In May, news of redundancies starts to filter through (six months late, at a guess), and you nod and say nothing. These are young, highly qualified people, there is no need to panic. In the shops, the sales come early and often. An assistant in Dundrum shopping ...”

“... wound than exile, and I suspect (perhaps because of my familiarity with Israeli society) that it may have deformed political discourse in Israel even more than the Nakba has deformed political discourse among Palestinians. A recent poll shows that the majority of Israelis conceive their national identity to be based on the Shoah, and the cynical exploitation ...”

“... 12 Sept. Afternoon boating – Paula Becker – Rilke. 5.30 p.m. engaged.’ They married in May 1901, a month after Clara Westhoff married Rilke. ‘Autumn on the Moor’ (1895) by Otto Modersohn. Modersohn-Becker found it hard to get used to her new life in the peace of Worpswede, with a husband and small stepdaughter. On 30 March 1902, she wrote ...”

“... that men like him ‘might become spiritually impoverished without fresh experiences’. Some may feel she has every right to the tantrums she throws, that her constant attention-seeking is not without justification, and that Herzog deserves to have his life made miserable by her. But Herzog is unapologetic. He imagines a friend reading the book and ...”

“... second time, according to an estimate quoted by Mattern, a quarter of the empire’s inhabitants may have been killed. Even when infection was kept at bay, wars and gladiatorial combat dealt horrific wounds to adult males. The city of Rome, despite its architectural beauty and cultural sophistication, was a cesspool of disease. Into this world strode ...”

“... poverty the congregation suffered in this life is easier for me to appreciate than the joy they may have felt about the next. I should have contacted the nearest surviving Baptist church a couple of miles off at Tilshead, but their website put me off: ‘We believe the Bible to be totally reliable and true, written by men inspired by God.’ Genealogy used ...”

“... entrapment and negation. Not Sidney is the product of a symbolically long pregnancy. His father may or may not have been Sidney Poitier. His mother is a bit touched, but savvy enough to have invested, early on, in Ted Turner’s media concern. When Not Sidney is seven, Turner himself pays the family a visit. Soon ...”

“... press. It amounted to: make a public confession that your god has failed, beat your breast and you may win the right to be taken seriously. No man who doesn’t think socialism equals Gulag should be listened to. It was no doubt a sincerely felt rhetorical figure in an anti-red polemic. Fortunately practice differed from theory. For most of us the image of ...”

“... in justice.’ It is, however, perfectly possible to produce crime fiction without that faith. It may even help not to have it. What if all the reasons Monsiváis gave for the non-existence of crime fiction in Mexico turned out to be its enabling conditions? There have been successful Mexican crime writers both before and since Monsiváis’s essay – Rafael ...”

“... of parallels’, from which, noting some serious and some trivial confusions, we may see at a glance that in John, Mary Magdalen arrives at the tomb alone and without spices, but in Mark with spices (to anoint the body), and with two other women.Also in John, Mary Magdalen reports to Peter that the body has been removed; Peter and the Beloved ...”

“... or boys. Such attachments can lead only to disappointment and harm; Nero himself, she continues, may have been nerveux, but that did not make him any less evil. Why Nero? Because, as any French schoolboy knows from Racine’s Britannicus, Nero had his own mother killed. Two years after his mother’s death, Proust wrote an article extolling the filial piety ...”

“... around, becoming a sober, powerful and born-again buffoon. Sittenfeld, a Democrat and a liberal, may be doing more to humanise the Bush administration than all the press secretaries, publicists, apologists and spinners in the White House itself. Defending W, however, does not appear to have been the intention of the author. Several years ago, Sittenfeld ...”

“... words, were intended to make ‘new thought . . . possible’. And this, paradoxically, may also be why he is so little studied or so infrequently involved as a participant in the parliament of ‘theory’. He was too inventive, too various. Far from making new thought possible, it sometimes feels as if Deleuze’s almost manic creation of concepts ...”