“... a dislikeable woman who dislikes the people around her and is duly disliked in return. The air of self-regarding discontent that presides over this book made me suspect that the stories for children with which Penelope Lively made her reputation were of the kind admired by progressive parents rather than by children themselves. However, my consultant in the ...”

“... to pure science, as if ‘physics’ were an end in itself, less a philosophical exercise than a self-justifying religion? This question is worth asking, because the life and work of L.D. Landau exemplifies the traditional ethic of pure science to the highest, despite the morally bankrupt, politically vicious and socially corrupt environment in which history ...”

“... of us. The exhaustion of Modernism, the aridity of Communist life, the tedium of the unrestrained self and the meaninglessness of the monolithic political chants all indicate that a long era is coming to a close.’ What will follow? Bell admits ignorance, yet adds: ‘I am bound, in the faith of my fathers, to the thread, for the chord of culture – and ...”

“... designed by Perrault for its east facade have no precedent in Classical Antiquity. They are self-consciously modern. He relates this architectural manifesto to the contemporary conflict between ancients and moderns, in which one of the leading supporters of the moderns was Claude’s brother Charles. He reminds us of the political aspect of the ...”

“... passionate, and suggests that when she does not shake hands it is because she is ‘so erotically self-conscious that she had considered beforehand how important and therefore how compromising to herself is the touch of a man whose eyes are in his fingers’. There were times in the book when I found myself longing for this creepy sexual magic of the blind to ...”

“... and equals. The mercurial Tsar, ‘great-hearted’, Napoleon-obsessed, religious fanatic and self-styled military genius, haunted by the somewhat dubious circumstances of his succession to Mad Tsar Paul in 1801, was everything by fits and nothing for long. Small wonder Barclay never mastered Alexander’s shifting moods. Who did? Usually he was ...”

“... or not we subscribe to notions of the moral economy of rioters, one cannot but be struck by the self-discipline both of the rioters and of their victims. It would he hard to add to Macfarlane’s list of scholars who have written (very impressionistically) of the lawlessness of the English countryside: it would be easy to swamp it with counter-examples. Why ...”

“... Hammond with Alexander’s emotional life, which was certainly of deep concern to Alexander: his self-image was at the core of his achievement. His conclusions on this matter (including those about the Ammon oracle) seem, in the light of all the evidence, to be essentially true. Like Hammond, he disposes crisply of the untenable theory that Alexander was an ...”

“... Since Frank Lloyd Wright designed the spiral Guggenheim there have been few star architects self-effacing enough to create a museum that allows the contents to upstage the drama of the building. Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum in Berlin and Tadao Ando’s sculptural concrete box at Naoshima are, typically, their own principal exhibits. Pei, in old ...”

“... why the Virgin does not respond joyfully to Gabriel’s tidings, but turns away in fear and makes self-protective gestures while she ‘cast in her mind what manner of salutation this should be’, as Luke’s Gospel has it. Homilists emphasise Mary’s ‘rigorous inquiry and critical thinking’, for she is committed to her virginity and does not easily ...”

“... no memories and no immediate sensory input (hence ‘flying’) would nonetheless be aware of his self. His most influential work was his proof for the existence of God, who was postulated as the ‘necessary existent’ behind the universe but not the immediate cause of all actions or things. His medical writing was equally ambitious. The Canon of ...”

“... and state power, and Freud’s theory of the double (‘an insurance against the extinction of the self’). At moments along the way, Cummings might provide a breathless history of alphabets or Islamic calligraphy. Several reviews of Bibliophobia have expressed an admiring bafflement. But mostly the results are explosively interesting: things far apart in ...”

“... military in 2022 rather than calling for a general election. I’m told that Nawaz Sharif (then in self-exile in London, fleeing from the many court cases against him, since he too fell out with the army) advised his younger brother, Shahbaz, to do precisely that, but Shahbaz wanted to be prime minister and did what the army asked. He will have another chance ...”

“... Pan Am and Pepsi and Chase Manhattan who were fuelling Japan’s wildfire growth. The school was self-consciously progressive, with college-style lectures and lots of free time. In seventh grade, we all took its flagship course, ‘Japan: Lands and People’ (JLAP).JLAP was designed by Jack Moyer, a craggy, outdoorsy guy who had a PhD in marine ...”

“... a well-sourced piece of non-fiction can sometimes feel like a way of drawing us back from the self-propounding multiplicity of possible realities.As a form, literary non-fiction has a powerful tradition, yet it has tended to feel the need to define itself against the virtues of good fiction. John Hersey, for example, tied himself in fancy knots trying to ...”