“... distinguished, apparently, in the language of the Mexica? Thomas shrewdly suggests that Montezuma may have made something like a mistake in chess: a ceremonial gesture of extreme politeness, which Cortés understood as such but deliberately took, when it suited him, as a legal commitment. Thomas sees the Mexica as trapped by their rigid culture, unable to ...”

“... fairytale. Often, Carter’s prose is brilliantly suggestive, at once playful and black: ‘May progressed slowly. The white lilacs in the churchyard where Honey said Ghislaine had been raped and hurt browned at the edges and reeked of halitosis and finally dropped down dead.’ This was Carter’s great gift – this stab of surrealism, this sharpness ...”

“... care and ethical unconcern, could declare that ‘questions about what it is that citizens may claim as of right in a democracy are also questions about what it is fair to expect of them’ [Selbourne’s emphasis]? For thus is civic duty kept at arm’s length by ‘questions’ without practical, or even comprehensible, answers: the questions not of ...”

“... and other reptiles. Planting one’s flag on a root sheath of hair, significant though it may have been in the chronicles of biological discovery, does not rank in glamour with the exploits of Captain Scott and Sir Edmund Hillary. Hydrozoa are commonly known as jellyfish, and Huxley seems to have devoted a lot of time in the 1840s to examining the ...”

“... avoids anything like that; not so much by reason of an inferred natural refinement, although this may come into it, as from a sure sense of what an art plucked from the past requires, if it is to remain true to its own unseen conventions. However embarrassing Aubrey’s conduct, loud boyish voice, and East Tennessee speech ...”

“... in the wind – all things animated. Soutine’s intentions, the way the work of other painters may have influenced him, can only suggest ways of looking. In the most important matters the paintings must speak for themselves. What is at issue is not what Soutine felt and thought as he thrashed or stroked a canvas but how we feel and think as we look at the ...”

“... was never more solidarity in the Army than at the height of debate and discussion. John Lilburne may or may not have been a bore, but it was his astonishing personal courage and persistence that dragged a prisoner’s ‘right to silence’ from reluctant authorities: a right considered so important by American ...”

“... have national ambitions; large numbers aspire to the thankless task of governing the country. It may be painful being president, it is said locally, but it is nice being an ex-president.The major damage drugs have inflicted on the Colombian political system is not the direct corruption of less important politicians, but the difficulties and distractions that ...”

“... has been wanting so much to open. When his father dies at the end of the book, it seems that Fima may at last be able to start doing something with his life, to become a ‘mensh’ as his dad always wanted him to be, to do good and avoid evil rather than just distinguish between them. The effect of all this is altogether too cosy and reminded me of a passage ...”

“... joining up the geniuses. The reason these courses have not hitherto gained much ground in Britain may well be our specialist and amateur traditions, which supposed, on the one hand, that no one could properly understand a text of Plato until he had mastered Denniston’s Greek Particles, and on the other, that the kind of general knowledge of Plato that a ...”

“... Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz is the Arab Balzac, then I am inclined to think that Salman Rushdie may very well turn out to be the Muslim James Joyce. It seems to me that the same cultural forces, historical processes and social oppositions that made the emergence of an Arab Balzac probable have also made the emergence of a Muslim Joyce possible.’Some of ...”

“... Christopher Hitchens may not be ‘the nearest thing to a one-man band since I.F. Stone laid down his pen’, but he comes close. For the Sake of Argument records a life of action, of being in the right place at the right time. Thomas Mann could never find the revolution: Hitchens cannot help tripping over it. This is, no doubt, the privilege of the foreign correspondent, but some are clearly more privileged than others ...”

“... were zipping through an amendment a minute. This is undeniably high productivity – which may have been just what Mrs Thatcher intended when she put the heat on them. But it is hard to argue that legislative Stakhanovism on this scale is evidence of, or even compatible with, the work of an effective revising chamber. Moreover, Donald Shell and his ...”

“... letter, informing her that he no longer wished to see her. The fact that this letter survives may shed some light on Colet’s masochism, a factor which her biographer fails to underline, although the picture that emerges from her enthusiastic account is of a determined but pathetic character who did her best, against considerable odds, to emulate more ...”

“... the fold through the baptismal ceremony, he was engaged on his master’s business much as, we may recall in Luke 2.49, this self-same master at age 12 found lagging behind at the temple in Jerusalem by his anxious parents, rebuked them saying ‘Wist ye not that I must be about my Father’s business?’ and not, in the word of a later English ...”