“... cite him at diocesan conferences as a modern update of the calling of the disciples (‘Matthew may have been a tax-collector. What’s so special about that? Our crucifer happens to be a bus driver’). Though Leo would much have preferred marching down the centre aisle to where he currently was, stuck behind the wheel of a No. 74 inching up Putney High ...”

“... for 14 years, the Workers’ Party (PT) has been comprehensively repudiated and its survival may now be in doubt. Lula, the most popular ruler in Brazilian history, has been incarcerated by Moro and awaits further jail sentences. His successor, evicted from office midway through her second term, is a virtual outcast, reduced to a humiliating fourth place ...”

“... to him. Later he was asked about his links with the FLN and the whereabouts of Agouliz, which he may not have known. In the closing stages, after two detainees were murdered in front of him, his interrogator made an incision in his back, packed it with rock salt and sealed it with sticking plaster. Weakened by his ordeal and sure he was about to die of ...”

“... in the foreseeable future, by conquest or diplomacy, have shrunk to zero. The South Ossetians may well end up joining their North Ossetian compatriots in the Russian Federation. That seems to be what most of them – having hounded out their Georgian minority – would prefer. But Abkhazia is a different matter altogether. If the outside world were to ...”

“... truth of Johnson’s remark that ‘a woman has such power between the ages of 20 and 45 that she may tie a man to a post and whip him if she will.’ McIntyre handles with his usual tact the question of Johnson’s masochism (on which, to borrow Boswell’s verdict on the aristocratic pretensions of Johnson’s friend Richard Savage, ‘the world must ...”

“... in the common language, as when we attribute moral qualities to non-human things; so a tree may be ‘majestic’ or fields ‘joyful’. Partly because of this, associating the beautiful with the good can take place ‘without too violent a leap’. Because it is easy enough to think we can make the leap, there is a risk that we will confuse the proper ...”

“... would be inserted ‘to link the work with the current situation’. The slogans may seem quite anodyne now but it is hard to imagine the Prom audience being confronted with banners declaring (for example) that ‘a revolution is not a dinner party; it is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another.’ Glock ...”

“... the afterlife he reproaches the pope for not being proactive enough in the ‘Terra Santa’. It may seem odd that a long discourse on Florence should occupy the middle regions of heaven, but Dante’s bitter relation to his lost city wasn’t to be erased by a visit to the civitas dei. The poem is far from being all sweetness and light: after St Peter ...”

“... will be decisive. The key demographic – unaffiliated 40+ white voters in the swing states – may be pulled in two different directions. On the one hand, many of them clearly have an instinctive dislike of Barack Obama, because of his sanctimony, his cool demeanour, or because of the colour of his skin. On the other hand, many of them also appear to have ...”

“... overarching narrative: Scheherazade is talking herself out of her fate. The heroes and heroines may live according to thrilling, ineluctable destinies, but Scheherazade is resisting death through the tales she tells, and if she succeeds will redeem her sex.In France, The Arabian Nights influenced libertine fiction: the young Diderot imagined speaking jewels ...”

“... region’s other ruling NLMs to cling to power indefinitely. Seen this way the drama of Zimbabwe may indeed prefigure a more general crisis as these movements age and decay. We have seen enough of movements that believe they will remain to see the state wither away or to usher in a thousand-year Reich to know that bringing them to accept a less intransigent ...”

“... Mbeki was only an extreme example of a general tendency: the incoming African political elite may have espoused universal values and human rights, but the racial prejudice of this aspirant national bourgeoisie was deeply ingrained: they were geared up to confront a white world which they quietly believed was not only superior but infinitely cunning. For ...”

“... on the number of irritating mother-figures in O’Connor’s fiction who come to grisly ends: Mrs May in ‘Greenleaf’ is gored to death by a bull, while in ‘Everything That Rises Must Converge’ Julian’s mother, an inveterate racist (as Regina seems to have been), gets punched in the face by a black woman and suffers a stroke; Thomas accidentally ...”

“... of them took to including asides addressed to her in the course of their letters to him. Posterity may also blame her for the fact that Lees-Milne either failed to keep or later destroyed his diaries for the middle years of his complicated and often unhappy marriage. His thoughts on the later 1950s and 1960s were lost in a maze of inter and extra-marital ...”

“... fears that it was the British Empire’s soft underbelly. How far would the French penetrate? In May 1798 the revolutionary republican movement known as the United Irishmen kicked off a rebellion, triggering revolutionary, counter-revolutionary, agrarian and sectarian violence on a scale unmatched since William’s day. In August, the diplomatic efforts of ...”