“... this way, and to the consternation of a certain class of cultural crusader for Afrikaans, English may yet assume a central, even critical role in the making of a new, transcendent national identity. Yet becoming detached from one’s ‘ethnic roots’ involves processes every bit as complex and worthy of investigation as those that inform the making of real ...”

“... loss: ‘I have never built a ship; draw a design of it on the ground, that, seeing the design, I may build a ship.’ Utnapishtim, the Babylonian Noah of the Epic of Gilgamesh, also has to receive detailed information from Ea on the construction of his ship. Noah is the only shipbuilder in the Bible, and he, too, gets divine instruction: ‘Make thee an ark ...”

“... of sticking pins into dolls and burning toenails. The ‘irrationality’ of Dionysiac cult may have a certain Nietzschean panache: burying a spell on a lead tablet in order to strike a group of doctors with unemployment is a more embarrassing (self-) image. The erotic spells can be vivid: I bind you, Theodotis daughter of Eus, by the tail of the snake ...”

“... language of the heart’ and so on. Bushrui and Jenkins stress Sufi influence on Gibran and there may have been some. Nevertheless, every element in his thought can alternatively be traced to Western sources, including Blake, Nietzsche, Emerson, Maeterlinck, Whitman and Ouspensky.Ouspensky was perhaps the most interesting of these influences. He was born in ...”

“... a loner, a watcher, a man obsessed with mechanical power, should become addicted to such fantasies may come as no surprise. But what about his wife? In all the first-hand accounts, Rosemary West comes as close as anyone can to being the traditional, almost fairy-tale ‘monster’: a brutal mother (and stepmother), she beats her children on a daily basis; she ...”

“... to exploit a weak India on terms of privileged access denied to her competitors, although that may have been the case. The fact that the generalised requirement for the defence of India was translated into specific territorial objectives by soldiers and sailors, Foreign Office officials and cabinets, rather than by Lancashire cotton men or City ...”

“... Jevons, wrote in The Theory of Political Economy: ‘The susceptibility [to pleasure] of one mind may, for what we know, be a thousand times greater than that of another. But, provided that the susceptibility was different in a like ratio in all directions, we should never be able to discover the difference. Every mind is thus inscrutable to every other ...”

“... puzzling and surmise; it teases the brain. For example, a reader of Life: A User’s Manual may notice a certain similarity in the names Verne, Cinoc and Perec, and may even link them by means of a word-chain, a type of puzzle expounded in Chapter 85. Can Perec’s outspoken interest in Verne be attributed to their ...”

“... minor feature’ of his ancestral landscape. But there are some things he will not do. Soft woods may be the current money-spinner elsewhere, but this is Dorset and, as he says firmly, there will be acres of spruce only ‘over my dead body’. Redundant barns and cottages can be sold off profitably enough, but a more concerted participation in the rising ...”

“... than to invest in arming their own ships. The failure of the Japanese to build up an armed navy may have been influenced by their abortive invasion of Korea in the 1590s. Their fleet was defeated by Admiral Yi, who deployed ‘turtle ships’ entirely encased in metal plates. Professor Parker is at pains to make it clear that his book deals with ...”

“... and wooden knockers whose knockery meaning is, well, a saturnine resilience, that the faith in art may be more stirring that the art itself. Does an unstinted admiration for the record of courage and sacrifice require an unstinted admiration for the writing? Apparently it does. Nobody will say a word against the poems for fear of slighting the martyrdom. Yet ...”

“... He is a man tempered by the heat of fire and brimstone; to him, Carmody is the devil incarnate. He may recognise that the devil is ‘a fallen child, too hungry to eat, starving, ravenous, alone so long he didn’t remember who’d first cast him out’ but it is his mission to exterminate him. Unbeknownst to Carmody, Parson is biding his time in 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”