“... tortured and sent to an unspeakably protracted death, Fanny is saved thanks to the good offices of John Chapman – also known as Johnny Appleseed, pioneer, missionary, follower of Emanuel Swedenborg and one of America’s more colourful minor folk-heroes. The novel concludes with a poem commemorating Chapman, and a short postscript written by Keene to his son ...”

“... seldom meets with moderation and when he does, it’s apt to give way to exasperation. And so John Barrell, reviewing his book on Tom Paine (LRB, 30 November 2006): Rights of Man (not The Rights of Man, as Hitchens persistently calls it) was written as an answer to Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, and Hitchens tells us that among others ...”

“... with the female lead is offset only by his boundless greed; a blind judge, the famous Sir John Fielding, who is widely believed to have been deceived by the enchanting villainess, despite his legendary reputation for discerning innocence or guilt in the voices of defendants; a rich and gullible Jewish sugar-daddy who attracts hints of anti-semitism; a ...”

“... a moral battle? A boastful miller tells everyone his daughter can spin gold out of straw. A greedy king locks her up till she has made him rich. The thoughtless girl accepts supernatural help from an ugly imp. The imp makes increasing demands on her, culminating in her promise to give him her first-born. The girl forgets her promise. The vindictive imp gives ...”

“... and pavement script. The church’s columns were chalked with words too, and the Word of God – a King James Bible, ‘User’s Guide on Back’ – appeared to float unabashed on a sea of London scrawls. For a few days after the explosions, the atmosphere was bad on the buses. Passengers were looking into every face as they sat on a Number 30 from ...”

“... but not hesitant. Parzival is a questing knight who is too polite to ask an obviously ailing king: ‘What’s wrong with you?’ As Ziolkowski says, he unthinkingly obeys the protocol of courtly etiquette, and thereby forgets the Christian imperative of charity. Arguably, he has repressed the instinct of compassion; in that sense, he is inhibited. But ...”

“... rhetorical style is modelled on the Rat Pack’s favourite comedian, another Don – Rickles, the king of insults. He’s been pretty good at it: ‘Little Marco Rubio’, ‘Low Energy Jeb Bush’, ‘Birdbrain Nikki Haley’ doomed them in the primaries. But Kamala Harris had him flummoxed. He tried recycling some of the old Hillary Clinton epithets ...”

“... British (1987) about Auden, Dali, MacNeice and Co – both begins and ends with the first words of John Masefield’s ‘Cargoes’ (‘Quinquereme of Nineveh’), like a serpent with its tail in its mouth. Codes and allusions proliferate in ‘Yarrow’ too, but are not allowed to structure its meanings or progression to the same extent; underlying – or ...”

“... part of the Northwest Passage, the so-called ‘Arctic Grail’. From Martin Frobisher in 1576 to John Franklin in 1845, generations of European explorers searched for a navigable route through the Arctic islands to Asia. Many of them – including Franklin and his men – died in the attempt. Their greatest challenge was sea-ice, which has almost always ...”

“... and, known as Jeanne des Anges, she toured France, showing her hand to vast crowds, and to the King, the Queen and Cardinal Richelieu. In 1645, a visitor to Loudun, Balthasar de Monconys, went to see the prioress and her sacred hand. Only he did not simply observe; he reached out his hand to hers: ‘With the tip of my fingernail, with a light touch I ...”

“... its own fixed conclusion: ‘In our experience, most things end with death,’ Stoppard’s Player King remarks. But Stoppard, like Browning, allows himself to side with the underdog. Shakespeare’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are a slight and slippery pair. Stoppard gives them a touchingly stoic resilience, and an irresistibly baffled wit. They are as ...”

“... diluting the Black vote. ‘I did not take race into consideration when drawing this map,’ Phil King, the state senator responsible for the redistricting legislation, claimed. ‘I drew it based on what would better perform for Republican candidates.’ His colleague Todd Hunter, who introduced the redistricting bill, agreed. ‘The underlying goal of this ...”

“... too dangerous to proceed, and shelves it. Instead, he agrees to a catastrophic deal, brokered by John Prescott, which commits him to handing over to Brown before the end of his second term, on the condition that Brown gives him his full support in the interim. As even Blair acknowledges, this was a terrible mistake. The agreement made no sense, because its ...”

“... have a memory of sitting there and feeling smug,’ she wrote of attending a class taught by John Crowe Ransom in 1938. She identified as a Trotskyite, placing herself on the anti-Stalinist left along with the writers she admired: Irving Howe, Dwight Macdonald and Mary McCarthy.Hardwick wanted to flee to New York, like ‘a provincial in Balzac, yearning ...”

“... doctrine definitively trumpeted by Milton and Locke, and knocked into some sort of final shape by John Stuart Mill? Even before you get to today’s remix of the debate, you cannot help noticing two features of it. First, the zealots today are no longer the progressives on the left – liberals, socialists, trade unionists. Instead they are predominantly on ...”