“... the Thames,’ a British traveller to Kronstadt wrote in the early 19th century, did I observe a more extensive or denser forest of masts. It was gratifying to find that they were nearly all belonging to our country, and of course so many practical testimonies to our wealth, reputation and enterprise. Besides the crews of these vessels, every second person ...”

“... she cried out: ‘O God! I must die!’ By midnight, she was dead. Anna Fessler’s death opens Thomas Robisheaux’s microhistory of a single trial for witchcraft in a small Franconian principality. The court barber-surgeon and bath master, called to examine the corpse, reported it distended and pale, but they could not determine the cause of death. The ...”

“... as Salinger and Brodkey swell inexorably with every book they fail to publish. Conversely, when Thomas Pynchon finally broke his silence to publish Vineland two years ago, there was a strong sense of anticlimax, of a man having performed an act of vandalism on his own reputation: in going to such lengths to focus our attention exclusively on his ...”

“... saint or founding shaman of the experimental method, and his most profound and systematic opponent Thomas Hobbes: a controversy which began in 1661 with the publication of Hobbes’s Dialogus physicus de natura aeris and which continued in a variety of forms into the 1670s. Leviathan and the Air-Pump is the result of that study, and it includes as an appendix ...”

“... felt a welling-up of tears and grief, of memory and of an intense urge ‘to go home’ just once more: but the familiar stones were not home nor was the elevator or the balustrade. Dad has been dead for 34 years and Mom for 14, and little Jonny is gone too. I sat for half an hour quite paralysed with grief. There were no ghosts in my jolly corner, just an ...”

“... the Sixties became the Sixties. William Golding, Iris Murdoch, Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, Thomas Pynchon, who else? Oë wrote his graduation thesis on Sartre (in 1959), and evokes Camus in Hiroshima Notes: ‘A plague that ravages a city in North Africa, for example, appears as an abnormal phenomenon; but the doctors and citizens who struggle against ...”

“... revolution.’ For any action to take place, the novel needs another force, which emerges as the more determined and unconflicted figure of Paul Muniment, who is all outwardness, decisiveness and manliness, with politics that are focused, thought-out, physical, set against Robinson’s ambiguous sexual and social presence. But drama in the novel can only ...”

“... Basic Knowledge, which ordinary people are expected to possess, people for whom school was no more than a bad dream. Here they can reassure themselves that they have the information they need in order to carry on ordinary conversations. This is a Manual of Contemporary Folklore. There is no entry on Culture, but there is one on the Cultural ...”

“... desire and money as part of a course about 20th-century narrative I’d titled, quoting from Thomas Wolfe, ‘Life is strange and the world is bad’; nothing else but Pandora’s Box would do. Happily, they did not fidget or shuffle, but sat like mice. Finally Jack the Ripper stabbed Lulu just as, or just because, she turns towards him the full force of ...”

“... The title-sequence of Seamus Heaney’s sixth collection finds him on Station Island, Lough Derg, more commonly known as St Patrick’s Purgatory. It’s the setting for a pilgrimage undertaken by thousands of Irish men and women each year. For three days they fast and pray, deprive themselves of sleep, and walk barefoot round the station ‘beds’ – circles of rough stones said to be the remains of monastic huts ...”

“... of comets in space and he was chosen to lead the Académie committee on comets’ orbits. More than most other Frenchmen Laplace helped define the ways in which precisely calculable laws seemingly govern both nature and society. He was interior minister under the Consulate, senator, head of the Parisian scientific community, and survived the Bourbon ...”

“... newly-formed Australia Council. Behind established international figures such as Patrick White, Thomas Keneally and now Peter Carey crowds a small army – a second wave, as it were – of grant-garlanded and prize-bedecked novelists and storytellers, many of whom, especially those whose reputations derive initially from short fiction, have benefited from ...”

“... independence from Europe, but its very scope, speed and lightness of touch leave one hankering for more information and perhaps a little less hankering on the part of Balthasar. Fuentes shares with Homero Aridjis a concern with the ability of individuals and people to assert their own identity and ‘destiny’. For Fuentes it has long been a question of ...”

“... pertinent prints. Many galleries have only one Cranach, and you can see why they might not want more. Much is repetitive. All five pictures in the exhibition have the sky that fades from vibrant blue to pale yellow; three have a rocky hill, distant buildings and a reflecting lake; all include dark evergreen foliage against which naked figures stand out. And ...”

“... with such clarity in their laboratories and papers?If we accept this periodisation, it is now more than half a century since the heyday of political modernism and the sociological project that accompanied it. Are we still, today, postmodern? Are we really still grappling with the fallout of 1968? It can certainly seem so when we are confronted with the ...”