“... gets blown up. Maybe Brookner’s view, which holds, like Thomas Mann’s, that to be a writer means dying to ordinary life, is less discouraging. Wolf’s Kleist feels something of this kind, but struggles at the boundaries between ideas and writing and life. Boundaries are important, too, in connecting these novels, since they are concerned with ...”

“... Kadavergehorsam, which the dictionary translates as ‘blind obedience’, but which literally means ‘obedience unto death’. Sometimes this archetypally German conformity has a surreal touch. A Czech colleague once told me that on a research visit to Leipzig he had seen a street-cleaning van sprinkling away during a rainstorm. At that moment, he told ...”

“... speaking, the world would still be a matter of creation even if it had no origin. Creation means that God’s love sustains it in being, not that he threw it together some aeons ago in a fit of false optimism. The imagination is thought by some Romantics to be like God because it transcends all partial viewpoints, but is able at the same time to enter ...”

“... first deployed by the Soviet navy almost sixty years ago, and were targeted by very basic means, relying on the merchant ships’ own tracking beacons, the Automatic Identification System (AIS) used by all commercial ships to broadcast their location. Despite the technological imbalance, the US navy lost the battle, as revealed in a detail omitted ...”

“... coaches and managers of the major world soccer teams, and all manner of celebrities, ranging from David Beckham to Charlize Theron. There has been much speculation about whether Diego Maradona will attend the draw. He has been banned from doing so after a recent foul-mouthed TV performance, judged to have brought the game into disrepute, but he is apparently ...”

“... with the language of painting. In the show at Tate Britain therefore, ‘painting set free’ means something like the opposite of what it meant for Gowing. The aim of the co-curators, David Blayney Brown, Amy Concannon and Smiles, is to set Turner’s last paintings free from what Brown calls the ‘reductive critical ...”

“... of who really calls the shots in the UK. Rhetoric about ‘strengthening’ the union really means centralising the UK state, so that no alternative source of power can challenge the ‘sovereign’ absolutism of the Westminster parliament. Remember 1986? With a scratch of her pen, Margaret Thatcher ended the democratically elected self-government of ...”

“... Change’. These pieces, together with McFarlane’s insightful work from the 1940s, David Morgan’s from the 1990s and a later Catto piece on ‘The Burden and Conscience of Government in the 15th Century’, are his lodestars. The Henry he gives us is largely familiar: deeply religious, just in temperament, firm and busily active in points of ...”

“... products but for the most part embarked on alone. The world has ceased to be story-shaped, which means that you can make your life up as you go along. You can own it, just as you can own a boutique. As the current cliché has it, everybody is different, a proposition which if true would spell the end of ethics, sociology, demography, medical science and a ...”

“... Paul Fussell described how – at the age of 20 – he became a full-time ironist: one who, by means of his experience in combat, had learned to perceive ‘some great gulf, half-comic and half-tragic, between what one expects and what one finds’. And in his book The Great War and Modern Memory, the soldier poets and memoirists who featured most ...”

“... the behaviour of Macmillan in 1957, to mellow the criticism of the Russians in 1986, it is by no means an exact parallel. The fire at Windscale in 1957 was inside a massive concrete containment building into which it was possible to pump water. The Soviet facility is a totally different creature. Pouring water on the burning Soviet graphite moderator would ...”

“... organisms,’ he tells us, ‘there will be a tidal wave of new discoveries.’ Sam Harris means to circumvent survivalism by rooting his claims in something called ‘well-being’. Harris, who dabbles in neuroscience when he’s not saving the West from the threat of a new caliphate in the pages of the New York Times, believes that ‘questions about ...”

“... a very wide gateway to voluntarism. As Dr Kendall puts it, ‘believing in Christ to Perkins means sooner or later to descend inside ourselves; the eventual result is not merely introspection, but a doctrine of faith that could easily breed legalism.’ Our calling and election are made sure by the evidence of good works. This aspect of Perkins’s ...”

“... case, that tense and gender.If​ you think you know what the 17th-century poet Anne Southwell means by referring to Minerva’s owl, you are probably wrong. Southwell is alluding to Ovid’s story of a jealous crow, who worries that the owl has usurped his position as Minerva’s favourite. The owl is Nyctimene, a princess who was raped by her father and ...”

“... political circumstances of its emergence impelled it to be framed as it was? These are by no means foolish questions, but they are for the most part unanswerable, because our knowledge of the historical contexts is so fragmentary and the dating of the actual composition of many of the books so debatable. The result has been that a large domain of ...”