“... programme run by the United States Information Agency. Deciding not to use his return ticket on 1 May that year didn’t take great foresight: Serb units were already in place round Sarajevo and on 2 May the blockade began in earnest. Hemon, in Chicago, applied for political asylum and took any job he could find ...”

“... one do with a suggestion? One throws it out. For what does one throw a suggestion out? For what it may be worth. In one of his last columns, published in March 1966, O’Brien looked back on his catechism, compiled more than twenty years earlier, and described it as ‘an exegetic survey of the English language in its extremity of logo-daedalate ...”

“... each historical fact in a single work. This novel features major and minor events from the period May 1940 to June 1941. This said, it should not be taken as an entirely accurate historical record of that year. This seems reasonable. The past can legitimately be bent a little, to make a shape, but not broken. There are wobbles early on, such as Geoffrey ...”

“... anything to develop or explain the provocative setting, though you keep expecting him to, which may be the point.) As the book begins, Tarent has just returned from a humanitarian expedition to Anatolia, during which his wife was killed by terrorists. Because the bomb used seems to have employed a mysterious new concept in quantum physics called ...”

“... midst of oil booms. Maass can’t be held responsible for all the wrongheaded thinking his book may encourage, but he might at least have considered the difference between correlation and causation. There are factual mistakes, too, in Maass’s account, specifically in his discussion of Saudi Arabia, the area I know best. Osama bin Laden’s ...”

“... a particular person? … It can seem that as far as what I really am is concerned, any relation I may have to TN or any other objectively specified person must be accidental and arbitrary. I may occupy TN or see the world through the eyes of TN, but I can’t be TN. I can’t be a mere person … The experiences and the ...”

“... diligent array of evidence: contemporary contempt and hatred for the work of inquisitions. Some may regard it as poetic justice that the Dominican patron saint of inquisitors, Peter Martyr, ended his days hacked down with an axe by an angry Cathar in 1252. Among the necessary expenses for Paolo Costabili, the inquisitor of Ferrara in the 1560s, were extra ...”

“... In May 1977, Ian Paisley was in a television studio in Belfast when he bumped into Malachy McGurran, a leader of the Official IRA in Northern Ireland. At that time, Paisley was attempting to orchestrate a repeat of the loyalist workers’ strike that had defeated the Sunningdale power-sharing agreement three years earlier ...”

“... with every pick-up truck he sold. (The voucher was for the semi-automatic version. US gun laws may be liberal, but they do have limits.) More to the point: the Kalashnikov has probably killed more people than any other hand-held weapon in history. That makes it one of the great industrial success stories of modern times. It was, of course, a Soviet ...”

“... bounded by northern Europe, North Africa and the Middle East. Of these, as many as one in eight may have been slaves, whether suffering in Spanish silver mines, tilling the soil on a nobleman’s Italian estate, teaching the young their letters or serving at banquets. Unfree labour was part of the Roman world. The idea of slavery structured the language of ...”

“... you can still read some edifying verses, in red letters two centimetres high: To my students: O may the god incline to hear my prayer That all may learn the Muses’ honeyed fare And, by the Graces’ aid, and Maia’s son, The heights of Rhetoric be wholly won. My boys, be brave: our great god will impart The victor’s ...”

“... and the people of Paris. Half of his 300 pages are devoted to the ‘semaine sanglante’ of 21-28 May during which the national army retook control of the capital after slaughtering as many as 25,000 civilians and combatants. He gives a vivid and grisly account of the street fighting, including the army’s use of machine guns to perform mass ...”

“... murders, and more battles. The openness was already there in the myth of fratricide: Romulus may have killed his brother, but he also welcomed all comers to his merry band of cut-throats on the Capitoline Hill. The Sabines became Romans, too, when the kidnapped women stepped between the raging armies and refused to allow their husbands and brothers to ...”

“... answerable to the people is less vulnerable to the charge that it is anti-democratic. And it may also give rise to fewer objections precisely because it seems less ‘final’, more easily altered. A constitutional decision imposed by an unelected court, by contrast, dramatically raises the stakes. The Supreme Court in Furman did not help matters by ...”

“... as principal ‘Cavalier’ poets: Robert Herrick, who advised us to gather ye rosebuds while we may, and Richard Lovelace, the stone walls of whose incarceration by Parliament did not a prison make. But what is Stubbs’s account of Milton, the spokesman for regicide, doing in the book? Why do we tour the agonised mind of the Scottish Calvinist Sir ...”