“... into a craftsmanlike tradition running back from William Trevor and Alice Munro, via Hemingway, Katherine Mansfield and Dubliners, to the Russians translated by Constance Garnett. She has been admired since the beginning of her career for her restraint and the air of naturalness she gives her effects. It isn’t hard to imagine her tacking lines from ...”

“... a minefield, a desert. The world is dangerous, a place of mirages and mirrors and trompe-l’oeil effects, a place where we are easily disorientated and innocent-seeming things prove deadly: where to move at the wrong time is to go 90 degrees off-course, where a piano or grandfather clock may blow off fragile limbs. To survive in this unsafe ...”

“... any real plausibility, the splash of the cascade. The installation is called Etant donnés: 1. la chute d’eau/2. le gaz d’éclairage (Given: 1. the waterfall/2. the gas lamp). It is Marcel Duchamp’s last work, and was first seen in 1969, some eight months after his death. If you work from the body towards the title ...”

“... for drunkenness. In his teens he more or less disappeared, though rumour had it that he joined the French army, travelled in Italy and then worked in the Low Countries as a merchant. It was not until the 1520s, when a successful legal practice led him into the service of Cardinal Wolsey as an agent or legal fixer, that he began to make his mark on the ...”

“... of Soviet satire. ‘A fine seat in the box and revolution on the stage. All I can say is: “Vive la république!” ’ say the double-chinned dinner-jacketed slobs in Karl Arnold’s caricature, while Toller, ignored by director and designer, stares out sadly from the photograph on the opposite page. Jürgen Schebera has already published a ...”

“... is not for delicate writing’, can occasionally irrupt with invincible common sense: ‘he puts Katherine Mansfield above Virginia Woolf, a “too well-educated woman writing her best” ’ – which at least provides food for thought; he thinks Galsworthy ‘a gentlemanly ass’; he asserts that copulation ‘has no connection with “passion” in the ...”

“... not above exchanging open abuse. During one argument about justification by faith, the Bishop of La Cava wrenched at the beard of the Cretan Bishop of Chironissa and Melopotamos, who had said that he was either a knave or a fool for sounding a bit like Martin Luther on justification. It is amazing that anything got done at all, and indeed more than once the ...”

“... acerbic: ‘a pigeon-toed only child with a receding chin and a you-leave-me-alone-or-I’ll-bite-you complex’. Her father, Edward O’Connor, was an estate agent, and she grew up in a four-storey house in Savannah, Georgia, but she seems to have chafed against the gentility of her surroundings. ‘I was born disenchanted,’ she later said. Aged ...”

“... other areas with old religious or monastic connections (the Whitefriars, the Minories, St Martin le Grand, St Katherine by the Tower), was one of London’s quasi-autonomous ‘liberties’, and so not governed by the lord mayor. The second was that there had already been a theatre in the area, immediately adjacent to the ...”

“... at keeping celibate. His wife remained in the background of Zwingli’s public ministry, unlike Katherine von Bora, the spirited ex-nun who married Luther three years later, but Anna still deserves respect for her pioneering role in overturning the clergy’s special status and privilege, upheld by the medieval Western rule on clerical celibacy. By the ...”

“... by his side. He died on a cold day in January, and they prayed for him in chapel. We are not in a French-Canadian Catholic school, because of the portrait of the founder in the entrance hall, ‘the school’s chief financial rock, a fruit importer who had abandoned Presbyterianism for the Church of England when a sudden rise in wealth and status demanded the ...”

“... more heat than light. Dorinda Outram put the problem in simple, clear terms in The Body and the French Revolution. Feminist scholarship, she says, has ‘very often been tempted to see the actions of militant women during the Revolution, and their political clubs in particular, as forerunners of modern feminist movements, rather than examining them in the ...”

“... republicanism’s loss of innocence in the face of the Terror. With the collapse of hopes in the French republic, English liberals like Browning and Clough – one might add Landor, who deserved inclusion here – looked increasingly to the Italian cause. One of Paulin’s main aims is ‘to redeem Clough from the neglect which his work has suffered’, and ...”

“... a prototype television in a cupboard?’ In time she grew accustomed to blind TV – now she’ll even listen to In Our Time with some enthusiasm, although I’m not convinced she’ll ever be quite enough of a dilettante to surrender fully to a programme that instructs rather than educates, and flatters its listeners ...”

“... too, for the custom of ‘manuscript bartering’ prevalent in the family, on the basis of ‘I’ll read yours if you’ll read and criticise mine.’ All of which is a foretaste of the warm family feeling which pervades this chronicle of politics and parturition (babies are born to the author on pages ...”