“... to be a copyist for Frederick’s uncle, the learned Bishop Otto. Otto was a pupil of Abelard (‘may God have mercy on this man who sinned greatly but also suffered and expiated’) and believes that he lives in ‘new times’, when ‘the man of learning’ is becoming more and more important. He is preoccupied with stories of the fabled realm of Presbyter ...”

“... The green in Lucretia is death incarnate. The pot plant in The Jewish Bride is a ghost. It may be that partly this has to do with practicalities, material events – fading and darkening of colours, the price of pigments and so on. But this cannot be decisive. We are dealing so clearly with an aesthetic choice, which is in turn an ethical and ...”

“... by Lerner) is a gesture towards intimacy between author and reader, a gesture after Whitman. It may be presumptuous for a white, male scion of the professional American middle classes to offer a fictionalised version of his life as representative of a larger public. It’s certainly presumptuous for almost any literary novelist to imagine he’d have enough ...”

“... as amateur, do-it-yourself stuff. But then we are all amateurs in and of our own lives.’ ‘We may allow Death, like God, to be an occasional ironist,’ Barnes says. But there is one final, terrible irony to the book, surely unimaginable when Barnes was writing it but which for someone reading it now is impossible to ignore. Nothing to Be Frightened Of ...”

“... national consciousness, but it is little known elsewhere. This final outburst of bona fide fascism may seem startling without being significant, but even a semi-successful coup could have done grave damage to the new democracy. As Cercas repeats throughout the book like a mournful refrain, ‘it is a universal rule that once you bring soldiers out of their ...”

“... a hero from the Spanish Civil War who’s gone into hiding. Matthiessen’s filial ambivalence may have been complicated by the fact that he’d joined the CIA, where his main job was spying on potential members of the Communist Party among literary expatriates in France. In 1953, he’d founded the Paris Review in part as a front for that work, a detail ...”

“... certainty that guarantees Russian life a stable past and future, whatever individual rulers ...”

“... be writing. Each collective choisi (pastparticiple,you recall,of choisir)without exception and – may I add – very naturally desires for the nonce nothing but Adolph’s Absolute Annihilation,Coûte Que Coûte(SIC). A man who once became worshipped of one thousand million pubbul by not falling into the ocean while simultaneously peeping through a periscope ...”

“... half that expanse, around eighty million hectares, is preserved as ‘inhabited landscapes’. It may be the case, as many ecological socialists argue, that capitalism’s logic of accumulation and ceaseless technological innovation places unsustainable stress on the environment, generating an ever widening rift between humans and nature. Hecht is more ...”

“... assessment of the peculiarity of a locally rooted mini-sect. And yet, insignificant as they may be, the fortunes of this small, quarrelsome, fissiparous and yet cohesive group on the edge of the cataclysms of the 1930s and 1940s shine small beams of light into its darkness. Most of Davis’s book naturally deals with this phase of their development. The ...”

“... employed Jobs as foreman for ‘a crew of freaks’ at his New Age apple-farming commune – which may have been the inspiration for Apple’s name. Friedland went on to make billions in mining overseas. Jobs dismissed him to Isaacson as a ‘con man’, but their careers – from self-discovery to charismatic leadership to great wealth – bear out the ...”

“... the king’s subjects in 1931? In Delumeau’s late medieval and early modern Europe, the question may be answered with some confidence. In the Christian West of his period there were organic links between what priests and preachers thought and what the faithful practised, though we cannot regard them as congruent. The Roman Catholic clergy had both ...”

“... months are the best season for a tour in North Italy,’ Baedeker advised, ‘especially April and May or the second half of September and October.’ Richard and Ellis were travelling by the book. As for the chances of getting mugged, ‘public safety in Northern Italy is on as stable a footing as to the north of the Alps. Travellers will naturally avoid ...”

“... spawn,’ Martin Jay wrote in Downcast Eyes, his historical survey of the rhetoric of vision, may ‘be justly said to have expressed that privileging of sight so often taken to characterise the modern era in general.’ By ‘so often taken’, he is referring to the impact of Foucault’s pessimistic interpretive schemes, which ascribe to the 18th ...”

“... catering to these folk – if not in person, then in the persons of those they buy and let to. Rob may speak of river walkways and thoroughfares running between the new blocks (all of which are to be named, touchingly, after ex-power station workers), but even on the tiny scale afforded by the model in the sales centre, the development screams ...”