“... and has never really lost it. It has only just dawned on me that it might happen to me: indeed, may have happened already. I now go to the gym three times a week. I eat salad for lunch. People tell me how well I look. I suppose that means I must have been fat until recently and just didn’t realise it. Which makes me wonder: at what point are you thin and ...”

“... think I had stolen the money, yet it also did not seem impossible.’ Not knowing what secrets she may be hiding, she develops a fear of being exposed: ‘I was terrified of unwittingly leaving behind a scrap of paper on which were written all my private desires and humiliations. The fact that no such scrap of paper existed, that I did not even keep a diary ...”

“... eruption of violence during a national strike for an eight-hour day. The strike, which began on 1 May 1886, was immediately joined by revolutionary socialists of an anarchist bent. It was particularly fierce in Chicago, where earlier strikes had been broken by the use of armed force, and hundreds, perhaps thousands of workers had formed militias in order to ...”

“... the horizon. Kavenna might have mentioned this as the probable origin of many delusory Thules; it may even underpin the Flat Earthers’ conviction that a great ice barrier forms the rim of the disc on which we all live. In any case, her own internal compass is evidently appeased by snow, ice and wintry desolation. But in her prose I miss the intense ...”

“... made war on darkness in repeated incarnations; as he raises himself out of the material world, so may others who retain the spark of the divine being. But Bloom’s myth is not likely to apply primarily to being, to living, or to the religious state of knowing: his concern has always been with writing. Perscors’s discovery of his identity reminds us of an ...”

“... for the lost glories of Fulton, and never even asks whether the civil servants who buried it may have been right. Yet one of the few clear lessons of the last twenty years is that that sort of 1960s scientism is nonsense, that the ‘cult of the generalist’ is much less dangerous than the ‘cult of the specialist’ and that the notion of a ...”

“... her soul’. This much is common ground among historians of Anne’s reign. Though they may differ in their emphases, depending on whether they choose to stress the monarchical or the parliamentary elements in the constitution, there is agreement that Anne the Queen was very far from being a negligible force in government and politics, and was ...”

“... anorexia. There was, however, a large ‘middling’ group who raised most of their own food and may have been spared from the ill-effects of excess and deficiency. The diets of the rich and the poor, already far apart, diverged still further during the 16th century, and in 1597, the year Henry IV was written, thousands died of starvation or of diseases ...”

“... without the Times! Can the temple of the Establishment survive the crumbling of its pillar? There may have been a tendency, as Eric Jacobs suggests in his chronicle of the 11-month shut-down which brought about the present disaster, for the boardroom protagonists to regard the affair in the light of one of Mr William Rees-Mogg’s editorials. However, we ...”

“... which we require if we are to believe on similarly rational grounds that God does not exist may not differ from each other in significant ways. Generally, when questions of existence are in doubt, the onus of justification lies with those who maintain that something of such and such a kind does exist, and generally therefore it is reasonable to continue ...”

“... the precondition for the claims science makes to its high status. Wittingly or unwittingly, Calder may have done his best to destroy the slim chance Hoyle and his collaborators have of being treated seriously by even mentioning him. Calder himself reports the ‘heavy-handed scorn and vilification’ with which his own (correct) suggestion about the incidence ...”

“... it is the consequence of a belief – the belief that as well as the mind there is the soul, which may know and feel things the mind cannot grasp, except perhaps by fragmentary translations into words which are not the words we use every day. It is not a belief that is often exemplified in modern fiction. In saying this, we run into the danger of making ...”

“... to quietism – ‘suffering is the badge; one accepts it as the mark of fate.’ Such an attitude may even account for the ‘extreme passivity’ of the Jews in the death camps. ‘The fatalism that comes out of the religious tradition violates one’s conception of a personal autonomy ... The Orthodox view of Judaism is too constricted ... to feel at home ...”

“... and increasing compassion for characters caught up in decay and confusion, so that, though they may be the puppets of history, they are not merely puppets.’ Finally, there is the diary Farrell kept during early 1971, when he was travelling in India to gather material for The Siege of Krishnapur. Not meant for publication, this is a noticeably less stylish ...”

“... in its architecture and its political character. A new parliament building had been inaugurated in May. The Central Vista, the axis of the British imperial capital, was being reconstructed at vast expense. The exhibition complex across the street from the Purana Qila had been razed and rebuilt as the venue for the 2023 G20 Summit. As the climax of India’s ...”