“... constipated in the way the junky intestine usually is, to loosen off and start to move. You may imagine what happens next. This episode is very funny in its grossness, a sort of realist version of William Burroughs’s talking arsehole routine. But it is also, like the talking arsehole routine, much more than merely funny. As I have said already, one of ...”

“... he opposes; either he allows it to refute itself, by depicting the terrible human consequences it may entail, or he poses an alternative image exemplifying another moral attitude (just as he counterposes Ivan Karamazov’s Legend of the Grand Inquisitor to the account of Father Zosima’s life). In the Diary he closes with an image of himself as a ...”

“... are natural bedfellows. Mormons – like Muslims – would have died for their prophet: it may have been in recognition of this that Joseph Smith, a more far-sighted, humane and intelligent man than Koresh, surrendered to the authorities at Carthage, Illinois in 1844, in circumstances very similar to those preceding the tragic events at Waco. Faced ...”

“... while allowing and even encouraging them to make false moves that played into his hands. By May 1937, he had ‘control over every aspect of political life. Only the areas of jurisdiction of the Church eluded him,’ though he had the Church’s enthusiastic support for his so-called crusade. ‘Otherwise, his powers were comparable to those of Hitler ...”

“... the foreseeable returns of investments in Guinea or in China. Sloane imagined that nations may always have lived by such a commercial code. Siberian relics of mammoth tusks could not be Roman burials, he judged, because ‘no one would be so ridiculous as to bury their ivory teeth, which are of high price with all nations.’ Sloane’s ...”

“... was elected with Dickens), Babbage’s parties (to which he took his sister ‘that she may see the World’) and dinners with the literati, including Carlyle, who nauseated Darwin with his bombastic mysticism. There are darker moments too: Emma’s worry over his religious doubt, and Darwin, intermittently ill, fearing that he would do no more in ...”

“... and ossified organisations as the Communist Youth League, the trade unions and the Party apparatus may be long overdue. Nevertheless, something is disintegrating and nothing has yet taken its ...”

“... labour which produced them than in the desire they arouse. In ‘The Prussian Officer’ (written May-June 1913), the scar on a young orderly’s thumb drives his superior to distraction. ‘And the next day he had to use all his will-power to avoid seeing the scarred thumb. He wanted to get hold of it and – a hot flame ran in his blood.’ The scar is the ...”

“... and the merits of patriarchy as a ruling principle, to take a central example, the reader may well come away feeling decidedly sympathetic to Paine’s no-nonsense prose, matched to Paine’s no-nonsense demand that he should be shown the much-vaunted British constitution before being asked to refer it to the French, and preferring Mary ...”

“... the use of getting involved in a bloody saga if you won’t tell a poet about it?’ Berton may not be a poet, but he is a fluent writer of narrative prose, and The Arctic Grail is the best survey of 19th-century Arctic exploration yet written. William Barr has translated and edited Heinrich Klutschak’s Als Eskimo unter den Eskimos as Overland to ...”

“... resources policy, or lack of it, and the frequent unwisdom of its conservationists. (Greeney she may not be, but greenie she is, whatever her quarrels with the rest of them.) Earlier on, she sounded often like one more case of that expatriate’s syndrome which so often sends resident Australian intellectuals into fits of teeth-grinding irritation – that ...”

“... state is treating stupidity not as an evil but as a valuable commodity, the production of which may be encouraged in order to increase revenue, as though stupidity were a good in its own right. There is no attempt here, as there is in the case of cigarettes, to balance the amount of money raised against the merits of the behaviour which allows the money to ...”

“... airy, blasted, dead-drunk pieces are little exercises in sardonicism that by the end of a tune may have locked a grin on the singer’s face like tetanus; his songs lie beneath the masked voice in ‘Lo and Behold!’, not as something to outdo or transcend but as a tradition to explore for whatever stories it might have told, but didn’t.Frank Hutchison ...”

“... novel (or Pack My Bag) said it sounded as if it were written when the author was drunk; which it may well have ...”

“... every visitor as if they were a ten-year-old on a school project. On the other hand, while we may enjoy the theatricality of Strong’s remake and welcome the reminders about when and where the Battle of Newbury was, we inevitably regret the removal of large numbers of paintings to make way for all these trimmings and chafe at the intrusive packaging of ...”