“... at them and find them foolish; they’re not silly-billies, and he isn’t Rowan Atkinson. It may happen to work – in England – as comedy, or to suggest comedy to us because it’s broad or pitiless or unsubtle, but what if it is just broad and pitiless and unsubtle? Something is being clobbered so hard that we laugh – quite possibly mistakenly, and ...”

“... A conflict which has left between sixty and a hundred thousand people dead is not untraumatic. It may be – as Calderón’s government insisted – that a high percentage of the dead had knowingly opted for the wild pleasures of the criminal life, but thousands and thousands of others were collateral damage. Besides, even the worst criminals have the right ...”

“... and that the establishment of an oracular shrine on the site where it remained for a millennium may well have been directly linked to the presence there of mildly trance-inducing emissions, which would be regarded as a divine gift, proof of Apollo’s presence, and carefully fostered on that basis. There was, as Scott admits, ‘a belief in a connection ...”

“... Perhaps Howard was by now weary of managing her fiction; a lifetime’s effort at the typewriter may have blurred at times into that other effort, keeping house and home, keeping up with life. ‘The recipe said tinned salmon,’ she writes, but Clary ‘only had a tin of sardines. If she put mashed potato with them, and a splash of tomato ketchup and an egg ...”

“... but the Times was hardly the representative of the popular press Lawson takes it to be. The same may apply to his evidence for the prominent part he believes Tasmania played in contemporary British culture as the main source of his ‘extermination discourse’: a couple of landscape painters, with tiny natives usually placed – significantly, he thinks ...”

“... on the Olivetti. In retrospect, although the decision to revert to a redundant writing technology may have been prompted by the valetudinarian tower block, there was an underlying and more significant cause: wireless broadband had been installed in our house, and now whenever I was writing I was only a few finger-flicks away from all the pullulating ...”

“... marathon, as in They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? Their descriptions evoke the way a call girl may speak about her sense of being in control; they also fit with an argument about S&M that is gaining ground: that master/slave roles can be empowering for women. I am deeply sceptical about these arguments about sex and pain, but the theme is certainly present ...”

“... surely Attlee’s most important speech, after Chamberlain, deserted by ninety of his own MPs in May 1940, appealed to Attlee to join him in a national government. Attlee’s reply (‘Prime minister, our party won’t have you and I think I am right in saying that the country won’t have you either’) was what made Churchill prime minister – as fateful ...”

“... Is it not a prettie thing to carry Wife, Mayde, and Widdow in your pocket, when you may as it were conferre and heare them talke togither when you will? Nay more, drinke togither: yea, and that which is a further matter; utter their minds, chuse Husbands, and censure Complections; and all this in a quiet and friendly sort, betweene themselves and the pinte-pot ...”

“... some Islamic concepts to the Yazidis even though they never converted them. One such missionary may have been the person Yazidis revere as the founder of their religion, Sheikh Adi ibn Musafir. Records suggest that he was an 11th-century Sufi preacher, though Yazidis reject the idea that he was a Muslim: they think of him as an earthly manifestation of one ...”

“... won’t be a Maidan in Russia.’* Ukraine has lost the war, but what the war has done to Russia may be even worse. For years now there has been speculation about a ‘party of war’, which periodically stages provocations in order to push the president into decisive action. The party of war was said to have manoeuvred Yeltsin into Chechnya and, more ...”

“... study by the sociologists Ken-Hou Lin and Donald Tomaskovic-Devey, financialisation in the US may have been responsible for more than half the fall in labour’s share of national income between 1970 and 2008. Exorbitant pay levels at the top further widen the gaps: today, nearly 14 per cent of the top 1 per cent in the US work in finance, and take home ...”

“... minimalist works, and to some extent of Einstein. When you look at what’s being repeated, you may wonder at the tolerance of those who can happily sit for ten or 15 minutes at a stretch listening to the same commonplace two or four-beat figure over and over, without audible variation. Compare the opening of Akhnaten with the introduction to Handel’s ...”

“... Mali to Toronto). Novels are more likely to be about adultery than the invasion of Iraq. Society may stretch no further than the confines of the family, with its sick fantasies and monstrous secrets, its squalid betrayals and mind-wrenching boredom. There is a host of psychically challenged families in classical Irish fiction, from Tristram Shandy and Castle ...”

“... Ussher was simply deploying the best scholarly practice of his time. Today’s earth scientists may use radiometric dating, but they are driven by the same motive as Ussher: the quest for an accurate and detailed chronology. Rudwick emphasises the positive, or at least unobstructive, role of religion since Ussher, correcting the received idea that the 19th ...”