“... Joseph, the pious Bavarian, who had grown up to become Cardinal Ratzinger and then Pope Benedict XVI, appalled the Muslim world and many liberal Catholics by quoting a Byzantine emperor’s insults to the Prophet Muhammad. The Danzig lad, who had become Germany’s best-known writer and a Nobel Prize winner, the scourge of those who kept quiet about ...”

“... with dreams the tendency to be either beyond comprehension or all too obvious in meaning. When we read that in January 1818 two women were admitted separately to Charenton ‘entirely deranged’ by the price of bread and the fear that they could no longer feed their children, the connection between reality and delusion comes ready-made. At other times the ...”

“... Penny Feathers, retired from the Foreign Office and attempting to write topical thrillers; Tobias Benedict, an actor; and Vanessa Shaw, a bluestocking academic. The writers in contention (if only in their own minds) include Katherine Burns, a siren who can’t help using men; Sam Black, a tortured soul for whom writing is a salving agony; and Sonny, the 653rd ...”

“... up a society party in Sydney; as an enthusiast making a tramp into ‘the Mystic’; as Sister Benedict on a nuns’ picnic humiliated by ineffectualness when another sister, ancient and saintly, collapses and is carted off; and as herself, or Dolly Formosa, performing highlights of Shakespeare and dancing naked improvisations in the towns of the ...”

“... for dominant patterns. Here she was developing a mode laid out by others – not-ably by Ruth Benedict following Boas, both of whose influence on Mead’s work Freeman describes in detail. She was very good at it, although the approach is not one that would be adopted now, and perhaps it was collapse of interest in dominant cultural patterns which more ...”

“... of Lyndsey Turner’s ploy, abandoned during the previews of her 2015 production, of having Benedict Cumberbatch deliver it as a freestanding prologue, getting what has become a hyper-canonical hurdle out of the way at the show’s outset.) Samuel Pepys’s diary, as well as citing the passage when contemplating mortality and the plague, records that he ...”

“... more perilous, Nadezhda Mandelstam. Her manuscript, not yet entitled Hope against Hope, I had read at her kitchen table and then, with her blessing, sent to the West. It was not a time for too many memoirs. Lourié was my entrée to Akhmatova. Some year or so after the interview in Manhattan, I was arrested by a vision of scarlet socks covering frail ...”

“... Saul Bellow seemed to me to possess more moral lustre than your average pope, but then I only read him, I didn’t marry him, as five people did. The pope and Saul Bellow were enemies of nihilism in one form or another, and I would have given anything to hear a conversation between the two, the Pole so miniature in his certainties on the one side, and the ...”

“... bit of modernity had been produced in the same country, in Gutenberg’s workshop in Mainz. As Benedict Anderson has pointed out, print was the precondition of all modern ‘imagined communities’. Now it would give rise to the most widely-read book of the modern epoch, Marx and Engels’s Communist Manifesto of ...”

“... Legg’s pioneering work, Newspapers and Nationalism, in tracing how immediately the insights of Benedict Anderson can be mapped onto the growth and form of Irish nationalist consciousness in imagining a community. But his overall preoccupation is with disunion rather than Union. Though he opens by unearthing D.P. Moran’s 1904 parody of A Midsummer ...”

“... for promotion’ that he would deplore. Recently, he disclosed that while banished to Córdoba he read ‘all 37 volumes of Ludwig Pastor’s History of the Popes’. But there is perhaps a third and more banal way to see Bergoglio. In this, he is simply a great conformist. His rise, in this version, is not deliberate or calculated. It happened because it was ...”

“... science, its art, its movies, its soda pop), and invariably coming up short, haunted by what Benedict Anderson has called the ‘spectre of comparison’. On a trip to Venice as the sultan’s ambassador, Enishte Effendi, the uncle of the hero of My Name Is Red, sees a painting of an ‘infidel’ on a palazzo wall and feels as if he’s looking at his ...”

“... property rights by giving power to hereditary elites who held local office. Although he didn’t read Locke or Montesquieu, like them he aimed to shore up the position of what we might call the gentry. Others, like the great modernist Wei Yuan, followed Huang’s lead. Their writings, neglected at the time, undergird William Theodore de Bary’s argument ...”

“... he shouted, ‘here is a great book that tells the Truth about Ulster. Go home, friend, and read it.’ The book was The Narrow Ground by A.T.Q. Stewart: did the book inspire Paisley, or did the voice of Old Ravenhill inspire The Narrow Ground? Accompanying this question is the problem of the relation of middle-class Unionism to working-class ...”

“... of what she calls his ‘romantic connoisseurship of struggle’. In the Guardian (October 1992) Benedict Anderson took issue with Davidson on several counts: that the virtues of armed anti-colonial struggle which he affirmed, especially in Portuguese Africa, were soon undone ‘by Stalinism and one-party bureaucratic dictatorships’; that if the ...”