“... run is louder than bombs, even if, as often happened in my day at the London Review, people would ring up to cancel their subscriptions when they violently disagreed. It was mostly after we’d run a piece by Edward Said. ‘I refuse to read pieces written by murderers,’ one of them said. ‘And we’re happy not to publish them,’ I said. ‘Said is happy ...”

“... plot invariably collapses in favour of a simpler but false explanation. ‘We must pull the first ring out of the wall,’ Don Mariano’s friend says in The Day of the Owl. Back home in Parma on sick leave at the end of the novel, Captain Bellodi reads in a newspaper that the murders he had solved are now suspected to have been crimes of passion. Perhaps the ...”

“... When in the peroration to his ‘I have a dream’ address in 1963, King called for freedom to ring out even from Georgia’s Stone Mountain (the founding site of the second Ku Klux Klan – the national Klan of the 1920s), he did not expect that thirty years later the Congressman from Stone Mountain, Newt Gingrich, would promulgate his ‘contract with ...”

“... its unprovocative title, its brass-rubbings and its frequent dippings into the nitty-gritty of Christian rites, Alan Bray’s last book, The Friend, might not seem terribly exciting at first glance. And yet it is written in part as a defence of John Boswell’s Marriage of Likeness: Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe, which came out a decade ago, and in ...”

“... in middle age narrated by a pagan who naturally lacks the conceptual equipment to understand the Christian significance of what he has come across. Put like that, the poem threatens to be very tiresome, a tolerant laugh at the benighted; but the tone is brilliantly well handled, and one thing that emerges from the puzzlings of this good and intelligent man ...”

“... Zeus, Helen and a house called Arden, the book collapses together Shakespearean comedies of love, Christian mythologies and Greek tragedies of desire. But there is a suspicion that the grandiose mythical parallels and godly overlays to the mortal drama are just top dressing on a squalid family romance. It comes as no surprise that Helen – who is married to ...”

“... campaign. She is currently being sued for enabling the sexual abuse of children recruited to be ‘ring boys’ at wrestling events.The future administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency opposes clean air and clean water legislation and does not believe the climate of the world is changing.The future secretary of energy, the head of a fracking ...”

“... warned, only half-jokingly, that were Sharon awarded the other position his first move would be to ring the government buildings with tanks. Control of the Army was withheld from Sharon the professional soldier, while his political ambitions were rewarded. Despite the inevitable pre-eminence of the Army in Israeli life, it has no militarist tradition and no ...”

“... example of the progressive intensification of a rumour. When the priests of the city refused to ring the bells in celebration of the German victory they were, in the earliest version of the rumour, deprived of their parishes; in a later version they were shot; and in a still later version they were hung from the bells as living clappers. The event from ...”

“... of the Protestant myth. Evans, a seasoned historical theologian, is in a different corner of the ring. She has an impressive command of the content of Wyclif’s 132 books, and she is in good company: in the fifty years since McFarlane’s volume, the scholarship devoted to Wyclif’s mind, and to Wyclif’s Oxford, has grown exponentially. As for the long ...”

“... complain that I am speaking in a tone that is too frivolous for a divine or too biting for a Christian’ – and here Erasmus ends and Burton begins – ‘not I, but Democritus said it.’ Sterne was himself a divine who had been accused of speaking too lightly, of indulging in extravagant praise of folly, and his Burton-inspired defence is that ...”

“... his appetite for controversy. The novel is tremendously fluent if not precise or subtle – Ring Lardner Jr said that Trumbo’s writing ‘was almost as facile as his speech’. His predilection for a certain kind of freewheeling bombast often led him to take up radical stances he couldn’t maintain. His opposition to war failed to survive Operation ...”

“... success. Even relatively minor figures declined to come. Some came but soon left, like Hans Christian Andersen and Hoffmann von Fallersleben, author of ‘Deutschland, Deutschland, über Alles’. The exception was Franz Liszt, who spent thirty years in Weimar in all. He first appeared in 1841 and was soon offered the post of extraordinary ...”

“... been two horrifying murders since I’ve been away. I sit talking to Alice and Charlie, the devout Christian parents of one victim. ‘I knew something was coming two days before,’ Alice says, ‘and I prayed to God, just like I am talking to you. I felt so heavy and tired, I just told Him: “Take all this. I give it up to You.” ’ As the anger and grief ...”

“... pencil poised, the poet sports a rust-red silk scarf over a black shirt and wears a large ring mounted with a chunky ruby. The painting is clumsy but it does express how seriously Hill takes himself and the stupefied awe his critics feel for him. One of Hill’s most notable champions is Christopher Ricks and we may approach this volume by applying ...”