“... with Augustine). Following a line of argument in the writings of Jesus’s contemporary admirer Paul of Tarsus, who never met Jesus in his earthly life but shaped much subsequent Christian thought, Augustine emphasised that humanity’s disobedience left it helpless before God’s wrath. If God chose to exercise mercy, that was his business; humanity had no ...”

“... of battling with the Estate seems to have altered Rose’s work, much as the discovery of Paul de Man’s wartime journalism forced Deconstructionists to deal with history. As she writes, ‘it can be argued (it has recently been argued in relation to the critic Paul de Man) that faced with the reality of the ...”

“... does not impinge on observers of the post-modern scene, and it is entirely typical that Paul Rabinow, whose engaging reminiscences of a term spent as a Fulbright professor in Brazil form another chapter of Modernity and Identity, appears to have seen nothing of the Protestant churches whose rapid growth in Latin America is chronicled by Pablo Deiros ...”

“... manifesto of Post-Modern architecture. There, in a famous opposition, Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown distinguished Modernist design, in which ‘space, structure and programme’ are subsumed in ‘an overall symbolic form’, which they called the ‘duck’, from Post-Modern design, in which ‘space and structure are directly at the service of ...”

“... understandable distaste from the tone of Mollie Panter-Downes, and of a 1943 broadcast by Peter Scott from which he quotes, that he is unable to accept the essential truths contained in their vulgar propaganda. Much of his energy is spent in battering at open doors. He emphasises that Dunkirk was a military disaster and quotes Churchill’s speech to that ...”

“... was repugnant to fellow architects who, nevertheless, appreciated his artistic genius. Gilbert Scott went, privately, to inspect Pugin’s church in Cheadle. When Charles Barry came to design the interiors of the Palace of West-minster he knew that he must go back to Pugin, who had drawn Barry’s competition entry. No one else understood Gothic well ...”

“... I felt I’d come across non-violent uses of this verb, and indeed it is said by Liddell and Scott to mean ‘to put, place, with or without a notion of haste’. And see Matthew 8, where it twice means ‘to put a sick person to bed’. Perhaps Thomas is again, as in the Bethany incident and elsewhere, subject to a little interactive psychological ...”

“... history repressed is more interesting than history expressed, as in the poetry of Southey, Scott, even Shelley. Besides, this historical foraging into the bad conscience of Wordsworth the ex-radical challenges the portrait of Wordsworth as counter-revolutionary which began to take shape around 1950, to be gradually developed by some of the leading ...”

“... Oakland’s general manager, Billy Beane, and his Yale-educated sidekick, a numbers guy called Paul DePodesta, who attempted to apply Wall Street style derivatives analysis to the problem of how to win baseball games. What’s attractive about sport from this point of view is that it gives you a yes or no answer, a win or a loss. Beane and DePodesta were ...”

“... his paedophilic housemaster. If Williams’s notion does not take sufficient account of the Paul Foots of this world, it also fails to take account of the army of ex-working-class socialists who are not averse to swapping their political beliefs for a Jacobean farmhouse in Kent. Orwell did not get a bullet through his throat in Spain because he was ...”

“... whom he appeared (as Auden once succinctly put it) ‘a most bleak old bore’. The distinction of Paul Hamilton’s formidable new book, Metaromanticism, is the success with which it translates these Romantic predicaments into contemporary terms, so as to make them feel wholly up-to-date. The subject is properly convoluted and Hamilton’s prose is not shy of ...”

“... Great unknowns, pen names and spoof attributions figure centrally in the genre’s history, from Scott, to George Eliot, to Kilgore Trout. According to the massive, nine-volume Dictionary of Anonymous and Pseudonymous English Literature there are, largely speaking, only three reasons for masked authorship, all prudential: ‘Generally the motive is some form ...”

“... noted committed Trumpistas (Rudy Giuliani, Newt Gingrich, Chris Christie); a few party stalwarts (Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell – who was booed) taking a sip of, if not exactly drinking the Trump Kool-Aid; and a breadline of hungry ‘rising stars’, fixed on the 2020 elections, hoping to be discovered as Barack Obama was at the 2004 Democratic Convention. On ...”

“... his discreetly disturbed life all the way to the end. The French text has an epigraph from Walter Scott at the beginning and ends with a quotation from Pascal: ‘Who is it who said, “A king without diversion is a man full of wretchedness”?’ Alyson Waters’s translation provides a longer passage from Pascal, which gives us a context for the ...”

“... and dark thoughts about fathers mingle with the feeling that it’s all well-known to be in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s books, or in daily stories about high society, drugs, spouse murder, alimony and – so we are now told – sleeping with trumpets. Edie, because Stein and Plimpton know how to interweave as well as interview, doesn’t succumb to merely ...”