“... today is obvious. There are other similarities: suspected economic motives; an assertive Islam; Christian religiosity on the Western side; international difficulties (especially with France). Only time will tell whether one further aspect of this earlier imperial history repeats itself in our new protectorates: the way Britain was sucked into Egypt, so that ...”

“... champion athlete, a talented theatrical performer and singer, even a ‘new Apollo’. Jewish and Christian tradition chimes reassuringly with this, painting Nero as a demon or the Antichrist. It is surely no coincidence that, as many have calculated, the numerical equivalent of the Hebrew letters which spell ‘Neron Caesar’ adds up to 666. Yet – and ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... a forced marriage, but teachers ignored her. When her parents discovered her relationship with a Christian Lebanese boy, she ran away from home – her teachers, concerned that he was having an adverse effect on her schoolwork, had told her family about him. Taken to Kurdistan to marry her cousin (one account says Pakistan), and forced to undergo a virginity ...”

“... is based on the rather sleepy idea that Marxism is essentially a second edition of Judaeo-Christian monotheism, with Communism as God in heaven, Marx as top patriarch, and Capital as holy writ. But despite the fact that a few Christian Marxists in the Thirties and Forties liked to see it that way, it is not a very ...”

“... soldiers, actors, servants, beggars, robbers and whores. There are characters exemplifying the Christian virtues, but the notion of moral and spiritual development recedes behind a rich and colourful series of adventures on the pattern of ‘one damn thing after another’. Purposeful teleology gives way to the rule of fortune, spiritual uplift goes ...”

“... was: that bloodied face, the hero’s grimace, the whole thing like a campaign advert directed by John Ford. In Milwaukee, I bumped into Robert Auth, a member of the New Jersey General Assembly, who began telling me and a Swedish journalist that the Republican Party had always been all about surviving and staying on course. ‘We’re shocked,’ he ...”

“... magistrate from Luxembourg rounded out the set.Among the next levy of judges were a founder of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) in Berlin, later a deputy for the party in the Bundestag; the son of a leader of the Anti-Revolutionary Party (Calvinist) in the Netherlands; a former aide to Dino Grandi, minister of justice for the Duce, and brother of the then ...”

“... wall in King’s Cross Station. Anna’s father reckoned that the Hadmans were related to the poet John Clare, who came from Helpston, a village near their own. Our investigation drew many previously unknown Hadmans from the ground where they had lain, undisturbed, for hundreds of years. They were known to each other, some of them, but unknown to us: lives ...”

“... been kind to the music of Schumann’s final creative decade; and it is one of the strengths of John Daverio’s book that it devotes so much space to a sympathetic account of some sadly neglected works: not only to Genoveva and Das Paradies und die Peri, but also to the Scenen aus Göthe’s ‘Faust’, as well as Schumann’s second oratorio, Der Rose ...”

“... a poor communicator working with poor material: students who are the typical products of a ‘post-Christian, post-historical, post-literate’ South African education, lacking a basic grounding in the context and sources of the literature which they are studying. While going through the motions of teaching them, Lurie toys with the idea of writing a chamber ...”

“... them himself ... It so happens that this thumbnail portrait fits Andrew’s younger brother, John Matthew, who was educated at Stonyhurst, better than it does Andrew himself, who was brought up by a private tutor at Marbot Hall. But what it describes is one half of the English experience Hildesheimer presents, the foil against which the other half ...”

“... moments in the history of American airtime. Elvis Presley’s top half on the Ed Sullivan Show; John F. Kennedy’s live debate with a melting Richard Nixon; an early episode of I Love Lucy; a dinner-table scene from The Waltons; Neil Armstrong’s One Small Step; the shooting of Lee Harvey Oswald; the pilot show of Roseanne. Each viewer wore ...”

“... didn’t even need democracy: fellow-feeling would have been enough. My great-great-grandfather John Low, arguing against Lord Dalhousie’s proposal to annex Nagpur in 1854, recalled from his experience all over India cases of our having suffered heavy losses in revenue, and very extensive losses in human lives, owing to the want of wealth among our native ...”