“... ran against Trump in the primaries; the two most prominent Republicans in the host state (Governor John Kasich and Senator Rob Portman); and scores of Senate and Congress members, governors and mayors nervously up for re-election, facing the prospect of having to defend or refute whatever would be Trump’s latest wacky pronouncement and losing voters either ...”

“... on a world at war’, Thompson shares space with some of her friends and rivals, particularly John Gunther, H.R. Knickerbocker and Vincent Sheean. Cohen is more interested in the personal lives of her subjects than in anything they wrote, an emphasis I found frustrating, even as I admired the stylishness of Cohen’s own writing. The broken ...”

“... to his official biography, it was his initial success in gathering followers that led jealous Christian rivals to denounce him to the new Communist authorities, leading to further imprisonment and torture in a ‘re-education’ camp. Moon was certainly interned for a year but Korean Christian researchers claim to have ...”

“... choice of name reflects a deliberate effort to disguise a bourgeois identity ... So many bourgeois Christian names got dropped, it was like jackpot-time on a socially alert fruit machine.’ If someone doesn’t drop a Christian name, Cunningham does it for him. Georg Groddeck appears four times as Walther or Walter ...”

“... that an ‘African’ was anyone determined to make a future within Africa. It was pioneered by John Garang, the leader of the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) in the south, as a way of holding together the New Sudan he hoped to see. In contrast, its exclusive meaning came in two versions, one hard (racial) and the other soft ...”

“... Thiel’s summary, the idea is ‘that imitation is at the root of all behaviour’.Girard was a Christian, and his view of human nature is that it is fallen. We don’t know what we want or who we are; we don’t really have values and beliefs of our own; what we have instead is an instinct to copy and compare. We are homo mimeticus. ‘Man is the creature ...”

“... more famous than the lyrics. Then in the 19th century an otherwise obscure genre painter called John Watson Nicol (1856-1926) gave the same name to his only famous picture. Exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1883, Nicol’s Lochaber No More depicts a miserable farewell to the Highlands. A man with a heavy plaid around his shoulders stands at a ship’s rail ...”

“... prices too, chief justices, lords lieutenant, lords mayor, George Moore, Sir William Orpen, Sir John Lavery, Walter Osborne, Jack Yeats, my famous namesake his brother Bill, Padraic Colum, John Millington Synge, young painters like Paddy Tuohy who really did paint old J.S. Joyce and died of his own hand, poor Sean ...”

“... that earlier in his work represented people coming together (on dance floors, at funerals, even in Christian communion) now portray ecosystems coming apart: the sentences and their overlapping images, like the ocean and the air, extend their lines of likeness, of connection, further than ordinary experience lets us notice, and if we do not notice them we are ...”

“... flock of Japanese schoolgirls ready to be fucked/ In their school uniforms in paradise.’ And, as Christian Lorentzen has rightly noted, no other poet records so frankly the casual air that until recently typified American racism: ‘One of the sovereign experiences of my life was my joy/Hearing my father in a fury call the man Boy.’ But there is much more ...”

“... Stephen Lushington, the dashing cricketer-jurist who represented the black men Louis Lecesne and John Escoffery after their unlawful deportation from Jamaica, was identified as the son of an East India Company chairman. The planters of Mauritius, which Britain had seized from France in 1810, were also damned as agents of subversion.When Macaulay & Babington ...”

“... Meanwhile, plenty of other countries might also have been classed as ‘pandemoniums’, to use John Milton’s newly minted word. France endured regicide and rebellion and the Holy Roman Empire lost perhaps five million lives to the Thirty Years’ War. Nothing in England was comparable to the sack of Magdeburg in 1631. Jackson anticipates and deflects ...”

“... histories of music written in the 1770s and 1780s by the English antiquarians Charles Burney and John Hawkins. Three of the four surviving copies of the original publication ended up in Rome, and Hawkins received report from there of its being ‘one of the best’ of Victoria’s works. Burney, taking this up, called it ‘much celebrated’. There is no ...”

“... The Ancient Paths was not so revolutionary. It belongs squarely to a tradition dating back to John Toland’s History of the Druids. Toland, who seems to have invented the term ‘pantheism’, believed he had uncovered ‘the philosophy of the Druids concerning the Gods, human souls, Nature in general and in particular the Heavenly Bodies’, but died ...”

“... a passage on the way to the bathroom’. This may be a limited interpretation of one of the great Christian virtues but it is pointing in the right direction. Yet the same person, when she hears that her husband murdered his first wife, instead of deploring the crime, rejoices that he hated the woman enough to take such a step. Maxim has no anxieties ...”