“... reduce the devout life to moralising calculation and safe asceticism’. A string of other shifts may be mooted: the emergence as a distinctive Jesuit characteristic of systematic hostility to all forms of Protestantism, which had not been in the original brief; the passage from the intellectual anti-humanism promoted by Ignatius in Paris to the classical ...”

“... dressing up futility as something else. In her other novels, McDermott tends to argue for what Robert Frost called the need to be versed in country things: the need to understand the indifference of a world that appears to mourn with us. Like Frost, she implies that the best we can do is exploit our own capacity for indifference: ‘They, since they were ...”

“... Hump’ as Bloomsberries called her, was 11 years older than Julia. The astonishing success of Robert Elsmere (1888) made her the second most famous woman in Victorian England. Her poignant saga of a young Anglican priest who defects from the Church to rediscover God in the slums of London sold by the hundred thousand in Britain. In America, unprotected by ...”

“... that provide clues and proceed, with varying degrees of caution, to do some invention. The story may then become so complicated that even reasonably sober academic biographers have to alter the whole shape of the early career to accommodate their guesses. When the fiction is provided by someone whose business is precisely the writing of fiction the invention ...”

“... life, and this seems correct. They provide the most sustained theme in his variegated career, and may be seen as a point of convergence for most of the tendencies of his mind. To consider the computers is to consider Babbage. Indeed his story falls under a triple rubric that belongs to computers from Babbage onwards: software, hardware, and applications. The ...”

“... into the alliums, so many of them that the poor plants are bowed under their weight. 30 April-1 May. To Essential Music in Great Chapel Street to record The Uncommon Reader, which Gordon House, former head of drama at BBC Radio, has adapted and is producing. What other readers are like I’ve no idea, but I always feel I am a sound editor’s ...”

“... appealing only to blacks), and Hillary, drawing an unspoken parallel, declaring that King may have been a great orator, but it was Lyndon Johnson who got the civil rights legislation passed. Certainly there are those who voted and will vote for or against Obama because of his race, but horizontal racism has largely disappeared in the US. These days, a ...”

“... 19th-century American palaeontologist Joseph Leidy. Then there are ‘men who knew too much’ (Robert Hooke, Alan Turing, G.K. Chesterton and, predictably, Alfred Hitchcock) and those whose knowledge ‘changed everything’ (Shakespeare, Isaac Newton, James Clerk Maxwell). Everything-knowers are admired, though with qualifications: the ...”

“... I feel like one who is on the sidelines, who has missed life itself.’ Mandela may be released soon. If so, a new biography, with his full co-operation, may be possible. Fatima Meer’s book is full of interest, but it is not worthy of the man: it stops and starts several times, is full of gaps and ...”

“... 1938, Hahn wrote a letter to Meitner reporting this puzzling result. She and her nephew Otto Robert Frisch, who later became professor of what the local Cambridge paper called Unclear Physics, realised that the uranium nucleus had split in two with the release of a prodigious amount of energy, and first coined the term ‘nuclear fission’. In April ...”

“... and not a review deliberately, and in this its title supports me, for, though West is discussing Robert Elsmere, The Case of Richard Meynell and Daphne, the ethos that Mrs Humphry Ward puts forward is the only thing that really interests her. Even when she comments that on every relevant page the face of the heroine Catherine Leyburn ‘works with emotion ...”

“... of his life’s work, inextricable from his larger concerns about history, culture and economics. Robert Casillo is therefore entirely correct to say that Pound’s writing raises ‘the problem of evil in literature’ in an especially clear way. ‘For it must be emphasised that Pound’s anti-semitism is quite different from Dostoyevsky’s and ...”

“... of this book so that you could not read it. But now you can. Or at the very least, now you may. I telephoned the publicity department of HarperCollins to inquire who had tried, and how, to ‘stop the publication’ of Newt’s fruits. There was vagueness. I was referred downwards and sideways and eventually into the post-voicemail void. Now, there was ...”

“... of the troubles with introductions, with images and masks, is that their implicit defensiveness may lead to a kind of stiffness, an inability to go beyond formality. Ashbery, who likes to think about identity in terms of flow, has always worried about our projections of ourselves hardening too much, as a passage from ‘The New Spirit’, one of his long ...”

“... our view,’ Eberts continues, ‘it was like Gone with the Wind.’ Only English. Some may feel the massacre at Amritsar was gratuitous violence, but that was English too. The Mission (one Oscar), on the other hand, won the Palme d’Or at Cannes, but failed to pull in audiences. Failed to pull in large enough audiences, that is, in proportion to ...”