“... is thereby somewhat spoiled (we need a technical term for this inverted in medias res, as though Robinson Crusoe broke off with the footprint). But perhaps we do not pick the world, which, on the contrary, picks us. Or perhaps, as the protagonists of Oryx were males, it seemed only fair to write a sequel for the female characters. The Year of the Flood is ...”

“... were bought any time anyone from the family went to Dublin. My sister became addicted to Jean-Paul Sartre. I remember a book called Words which began ‘I loathe my childhood’; this was an astonishing idea in Enniscorthy at that time. Not long afterwards another sister decided to build a house. There were no architects in Enniscorthy, but lots of ...”

“... at the age of 30, plucked out all his hair, and after 12 years of fasting, gained omniscience. Paul Davies’s exhilarating book, The New Physics, contains another of the elements which a modern encyclopedia needs. It has unhurried, meditative and occasionally even humorous articles by the people who are actually re-inventing the limits of ...”

“... Association. Her new friends were philanthropic thespians, including Melinda May, Lillian Nash, Paul and Clara Martinetti, Louise Smythson and Isabel Ginnett. They had all been famous music-hall performers in their time (Nash, whose stage name was Lil Hawthorne, and her sisters had dazzled audiences with ‘The Willow Pattern Plate’, ‘an ingenious piece ...”

“... The fault, they claim, lies with a number of rogue officers. In Undercover, Rob Evans and Paul Lewis draw on the testimonies of activists and whistleblowers to chart the history of secret policing. Their prize source is the former undercover officer Peter Francis, who spied on minor anti-fascist and anti-racist groups in North London in the early ...”

“... problem of free choice.The Green pulpit can descend to quite low levels of abuse, but Marilynne Robinson’s Mother Country is witty as well as vicious. It combines ghoulish glee over the horrors of plutonium manufactured in Sellafield and dispersed along the Cumbrian coast, with satire against the quaint insincerities of the British. Her comic touch is so ...”

“... Luther, Spinoza and Tyndale. Still, a phrase keeps recurring to my mind. It comes, bizarrely, from Paul Newman in The Verdict, as he mutters anxiously outside the courtroom: ‘There are no other cases. This is the case.’ By this he plainly means to convey, not that there are no other disputes or dramas or miscarriages of justice, but that this one has ...”

“... direction of Heaton were half full in the morning and nobody spoke. When I arrived at the house of Paul Wakefield I immediately saw a picture of his handsome younger brother on the coffee table. ‘He was my bodyguard,’ Paul said. ‘He was always quite tough, but brave. He was my hero and he always will be.’ ...”

“... heaven! I remember being woken to the rightness of their hyperbole when I found them misquoted in Paul Foot’s Red Shelley, where they become, even in ‘corrected’ editions, Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive And to be young was very heaven. Gone is the intoxicated youthful illogic, by which even ‘bliss’ can be trumped. That ‘And’ as we turn ...”

“... and is fond of dressing up in other people’s personalities. After the Almighty, after St Paul – for whom he confesses ‘a strange liking’ – his most influential model, or imaginative icon, is John Bunyan, whose life and work obsess him. Bunyan is ‘this dreamer and penman’, ‘the most prominent man of letters as far as English literature ...”

“... of judgment ... are invested in the overnight.’ After all, who would set Toni Morrison next to Paul Celan? And lest this reference to black women writers of the Eighties appear a random example, we might look at Steiner’s musings on the relation between gender and art. He considers the act of aesthetic creativity an imitation of God’s fiat. ‘In ...”

“... Marx. The most technical, Business Cycles, which he worked on at Harvard, was later described by Paul Samuelson, whom Schumpeter had thought the cleverest of the students there, as ‘Pythagorean moonshine’. Yet in 1940, Schumpeter succeeded to the presidency of the Econometrics Society and in 1949 became the first president of the International Economic ...”

“... dance of the intellect, if you will, and in these qualities have an affinity with the painting of Paul Klee. His syntax plays a critical role, with its orderings, the alternating presences and absences, its copulae or want of; clauses gone floating from the main substantive and verb; periodicity, abrupt declarative bursts. The poems have a tense, torqued ...”

“... another Huston picture, in which he is nicely matched with an odious gangster played by Edward G. Robinson. Bacall is in that picture too, but you might have forgotten because she is a widowed woman, utterly obedient to Bogart’s character. Bogart made another fine film in that period: In a Lonely Place (1950), directed by Nicholas Ray, opposite Gloria ...”

“... masculinity, displacing images of aggression and oppression onto women and racial minorities. Paul Budra suggests that the ‘Post-Modern’ element in recent horror films (their ‘very absence of thresholds’ and ‘loss of closure’) is analogous to the impulse of the genre to generate sequels, from the Friday the 13th films to Evil Dead II. Zeitlin ...”