“... itself and everything pretty much goes back to normal.’ That seems to have been Barker’s hope. The more common choice for novelists who find themselves at an impasse has been to point to the blatant – though belatedly recognised – inadequacy of the novel as a vehicle of expression, and to pursue modes free of encumbrances like fictional invention ...”

“... condemning and hanging effigies of John Bradshaw, the man who presided over the prosecution of Charles I, and Oliver Cromwell. The regalia of the vanquished republic was torn down and burned in great bonfires, three of which were positioned on nearby hills and were said to have blazed so brightly you could see them from Wales. The traditionally royalist ...”

“... and chapel-like alcoves; and it is dominated by a statue in white marble of the local deity – Charles Darwin – who looks down at a huge dinosaur skeleton from the landing of the staircase that rises in a double flight at the north end. Darwin’s ideas are so central to biology that there is no wall of fossils, case of stuffed birds, diagram of genetic ...”

“... senior general, Radetzky. Vicenza, Padua, Treviso and Udine all gained their freedom. On 23 March, Charles Albert of Piedmont announced an invasion of Lombardy and the Veneto. In April, Hungary gained a measure of autonomy within the Austrian Empire, which was now close to total collapse. In May, the emperor fled Vienna. Austria was on its knees. The major ...”

“... broken toys, as Ivan Lalic said. They are emblematic of our lives and we go on playing them in the hope that they do make sense, despite our suspicion that they don’t. For Popa, the biggest joke is that the pack has no joker. The cycle, ‘Give Me Back My Rags’, personifies the unknown joker and attempts to exorcise his power. The speaker of the poem ...”

“... the Russians agreed to leave Hungary, clearing the way for free, multi-party elections. ‘We hope,’ he added, ‘that the West will help us in our struggle.’ But the West was not about to intervene; it was otherwise engaged. In America a Presidential election was a week away. And in the Middle East, Britain and France, together with Israel, were ...”

“... opinion polls, 95 per cent of Iraqi Kurds in the north want for their independent state. They hope to add Kirkuk to the area under their control. Kirkuk was a majority Kurdish city, until Saddam expelled hundreds of thousands of Kurds and replaced them with Arab settlers from the south. They want Kirkuk, but they do not want ...”

“... in the Sunday Times: ‘We have killed ten thousand Arabs in this rising this summer. We cannot hope to maintain such an average: it is a poor country, sparsely populated.’ Miss Bell wrote to her father at the height of the rebellion that ‘we cannot leave the country in the chaos which we have created, no one can master the chaos if we can’t.’ By ...”

“... this what she has done upon very few other occasions. She realised in some measure the extravagant hope of her votaries.’ The British (and the French), who had gone with the same extravagant hope, had come home empty-handed. These differences inevitably determined the kinds of settlement that evolved in the New World. The ...”

“... when another flood marches through a month later.I heard the phrase for the first time in Lake Charles, Louisiana, listening to an architect called Jolee Bonneval talk about what she did all day. I’d been introduced to her through her mother, Suzette, whom I’d sat next to on the plane from New York to New Orleans, and who hadn’t so much as raised her ...”

“... congested time, perhaps the most controversial period of English history, between the breakdown of Charles I’s personal rule in 1640, when financial collapse and military defeat by the Scots drove the king to call the Parliament that would destroy him, and the year of the outbreak of the Civil War in 1642 (though whereas Trevor-Roper’s narrative went ...”

“... Appearing unannounced in 1977, Charles Johnston’s verse rendering of Eugene Onegin established itself immediately as the best English translation of Pushkin’s great poem there had yet been. It was an impressive performance even to those who could not read the original. To those who could, it was simply astonishing, not least from the technical angle: Johnston had cast his Onegin in the Onegin stanza, a form almost impossibly difficult in English, and had got away with it ...”

“... Charles Taylor is, by his own admission, a hedgehog. Though the essays in these two volumes range over a variety of topics – the concept of a person, meaning, the value of cognitive psychology, sexuality as a mode of political control – they all argue for one basic idea: that the conceptions of objectivity and scientific method which we have inherited from the 17th century are unable to give us an account of ourselves ...”

“... from her deathbed summons the girl David really loves and gives her blessing to the succession. Charles Dickens’s wife was not nearly so obliging. In 1858, between Little Dorrit and A Tale of Two Cities, Dickens sent out a press release: ‘Mrs Dickens and I have lived unhappily together for many years. Hardly anyone who has known us intimately can fail ...”