“... you to pick your way through the raucous crowd gathered there in the summer of 1975. Here is Martin, her faithful lover, ‘teetering as many were that summer on the dizzy edge of smack’. Here is Javo, ‘just back from getting off dope in Hobart’, Lou, Selena, Georgie, Clive, Eve, Gracie – and a little boy ...”

“... packet of mail’ where I see a wrapped brie or camembert with the maker’s name, Eugene Martin, prominently displayed. It may be a parcel, of course. Without looking at the original, it is impossible to be certain, though even in reproduction the label looks printed rather than hand-printed like an address. At any rate, a parcel wouldn’t make ...”

“... his Mary, a fleshly image reproduced as illusion on screen, is also the vision of a seductress, Eve all over again, whose body and speech could persuade a man to eat ... anything. As Bloch says, the story misogyny tells is repeated again and again; it’s a room with a hundred entrances and exits – different societies, different moments, different voices ...”

“... lodgings in Versailles, and attended every day the debates of the newly-convened Assembly. On the eve of the Revolution, women did not regard themselves as an interest-group. Throughout the century poor women had taken to the streets in times of shortages and high prices. But few people in 1789 thought that women should be allowed to vote – or indeed, that ...”

“... when Falwell provocatively visited San Francisco with a battery of New Right personalities on the eve of the 1984 Democratic Convention) as the way in which both have been forced for different reasons to engage in strategies of accommodation. Castro came to terms with the outside world mainly as a result of Aids. An initial refusal to face the fact that ...”

“... Though she was lucky to get such a big advance for her apprentice manuscript – half a dozen of Martin Amis – she set about learning the tricks of the trade from those who knew better, and is still learning. This, her second book, shorter and sharper than her first, is generally a better read. Compared with The Downing Street Years, it has the more ...”

“... Muldoon’s children’s books, The Noctuary of Narcissus Batt and The O-O’s Party, New Year’s Eve follow an alphabetic pattern, and To Ireland, I begins with the oldest Irish abecedary poet of all, the conveniently initialled Amergin. This ur-bard’s ‘Alphabet Calendar’ receives an ingenious reading in The White Goddess, Muldoon reminds us, where its ...”

“... made out. Desire for ever more amazing spectacles was universal, exemplified by the career of Martin Beckman, a Swedish mercenary tasked with arranging fireworks for Charles II’s coronation in 1661; he held the post of royal fire master for the next forty years. Unfazed by confessional differences, Beckman put on great shows that lightened the royal ...”

“... decision-making, just as it would a few months later when smartphone videos of the New Year’s Eve riot at Cologne Central Station triggered another 180 degree turn in her policies. In July a PR event, part of a government campaign to encourage cabinet members to meet ordinary citizens and listen to their ideas, went wrong. One of the young people invited ...”

“... collaborators – Southern hip-hop minimalists the Neptunes, the Swedish super-producers Max Martin and Bloodshy & Avant – it was industry logic more than personal preference. But that didn’t matter, because Britney instinctively knew how to inhabit a song. Her voice is singular, a randomised texture generator that can flip between baby doll and ...”

“... in part to the otherwise ‘laughable’ privileges they had enjoyed under the French. (On the eve of independence, there were more than 100,000 Jews in Tunisia; today, hardly a thousand remain.) While he didn’t criticise the colonised for using violence, and mocked European liberals who did so, he didn’t see violence as shock therapy: ‘You don’t ...”

“... in the new and more radical Reformation promoted in mainland Europe by rogue clerics such as Martin Luther and Huldrych Zwingli. Wolsey’s dissolutions went ahead: 29 mostly small monastic houses, nothing on the scale of Henry VIII’s later programme, but still a model for what came next. In short: monasteries into colleges. This is where Clark’s ...”

“... in the very notion of a Reformation image. The movement of religious protest inaugurated by Martin Luther in Wittenberg in 1517 quickly targeted the veneration of images as a damnable superstition, the idolatrous confusion of gross matter with an invisible God who was pure and eternal spirit. The 15th century had seen a great flowering of the visual ...”

“... it is untrue to say that ‘Orwell was to put this thought more pithily in Animal Farm.’ Eve is talking about the possible advantages of withholding her forbidden knowledge from Adam, not about totalitarian perversions of democracy. It is even more reprehensible for a professor of politics to misquote Hobbes’s most famous remark, about the horrors ...”

“... yawns open, embracing all sorts of possibilities. In the initial scene of ‘A New Year’s Eve Adventure’, the narrator describes his feelings of alienation in the suffocating atmosphere of a party at which his former lover, Julia, spurns him. His story of rejection is repeated in, and intensified by, the more fantastic stories told to him directly ...”