“... or determinist version of the past’. Where did Attlee’s socialism come from? Unlikely as it may seem, Bew argues convincingly that it came from America, from the futuristic utopian fiction of Edward Bellamy, author of Looking Backward (1887). In Bellamy’s novel a resident of late 19th-century Boston is hypnotised and doesn’t wake up until the year ...”

“... in first. ‘Downhill begins this year,’ he announced with grim satisfaction in 1966. Even this may have been a slip, allowing the possibility of there having been an ‘up’ from which to come down. Usually his defences were in place in advance: ‘All is I suppose as well as can be expected by one with my powers of expectation.’ Thus armoured, he could ...”

“... be ashamed to be connected with a man who used his great gifts to obscure the truth.’ Huxley may never have uttered these words, but they have become legendary, and they rankle with A.N. Wilson, whose new book is designed to cut Darwin down to size and discredit ‘Darwin-worshippers’ and their ‘new religion’. Wilson is impressed by Wilberforce’s ...”

“... as a hostile remark. His mouth stayed closed when he smiled because he was concentrating. You may not have heard of him, but for maybe a decade and a half starting in the mid-1970s no one in the motion picture business was more focused than Michael Ovitz. ‘Mike’ from the San Fernando Valley was an incessant, soft-spoken maker of order and system, a ...”

“... in many guises, some of them unreliable. (He hints, too, at the allure of parade uniforms, which may have been a source of pride to new regulars before they exchanged them for combat dress.)The silent ‘characters’ in Mimesis are nearly always distanced, and intent on laying their operations bare (‘I am an actor, that is a camera’). Yet once we’re ...”

“... to the Government of the Netherlands for the surrender to them of the ex-Emperor in order that he may be put on trial. The issues that leap from every line of Article 227 are tracked by Schabas as they were wrangled over by states with histories, lawyers and agendas of their own. Was the offence of which the Kaiser now stood accused a crime known to national ...”

“... 1. The concept of sovereignty may refer to the political control that a leader exercises over a society and territory, or the psychic control that an individual exercises over herself. 2. Sovereignty has a long history in political thought, not least in relation to the expansion of European imperial powers. But it was in Spanish America that its modern form – applied to non-imperial or non-colonial nation states – was first put into effective use as a diplomatic norm ...”

“... Is Possible are set in a different small town, this time in Illinois. Characters and stories may escape to New York – following Strout’s trajectory in adult life – but they usually find themselves drawn back to their rural origins. And the closely knit weave of connected lives in her work isn’t merely a formal device, it represents the nature of ...”

“... inspired an international anti-apartheid movement. The ANC and other South African organisations may have approved of armed struggle – which the PLO renounced in 1993 – but many of the tactics used to challenge apartheid were non-violent. A Palestinian Freedom Charter modelled on South Africa’s would be a promising start. The parallels are not ...”

“... Martin Amis novel done in historical retrospect, displaying a pained awareness that social change may not have felt like pure liberation to each and every woman one pursued in the 1970s (‘I ponced off the tenets of the Sexual Revolution,’ Amis writes, ‘meaning I applied peer pressure and propagandised about the earthy wisdom of the herd’), along with ...”

“... in Moore’s titles tends to mean ‘someone who is only just still a wife, and whom betrayal may free’. It has that sense in his last novel, The Magician’s Wife (1997), in which the heroine (whose voice often seems to belong to the 1970s rather than the 1850s in which the book is set) eventually betrays her magician husband. He is supposed to stage a ...”

“... made him swerve. Because I do see birds. There’s a kite comes sometimes, cruel-looking thing. He may have been looking at that.He was in his leathers, only at the inquest the police said his trousers were open.That doesn’t sound like Clifford.Some strange flowers there today. Not mine. Nice, I suppose.I’ve​ got myself an orange jacket. Hi-Vis, they ...”

“... rain down on the city and corrode the skin of everyone underneath so they feel how you feel, then may I suggest Courtney Love?You can forgive an 18-year-old meeting her idol some overwriting – though I sort of love the bone, the blood clots, the acid and the blistering skin – but what would become Moran’s characteristic stance is here: she’s speaking ...”

“... was closely associated with the administration of the colonies. However intellectually rarefied it may have been, ethnology – as it was usually known – often amounted to an exercise in gathering information about the empire’s subjects. Who was ruled? How did they live? What did they think? What languages did they speak? It didn’t help that the ...”

“... way of processing the world. He couldn’t be sure what ‘the experience of exultant plotting’ may have done to his mind – ‘at least not yet’. On the evidence of The World and All That It Holds, he still isn’t sure. Aleksandar Hemon isn’t the writer he once was, and his efforts to conceal it are fooling no ...”