“... not so much within the population as a whole, where religious extremists are a small minority (more confessional votes are cast in Israel than Pakistan), as within the Army. Officers and other ranks who have worked with the Taliban in Afghanistan and the Lashkar-i-Tayyaba in Kashmir have become infected with zealotry. At the same time native ...”

“... for the established place of Roman history in contemporary English-speaking culture and (even more) education. Books on familiar subjects continue to be written, and to find publishers and – presumably – readers. One of the five, indeed, is offered with the sole justification – outdated by the time the book appeared – that no biography of Pompey ...”

“... through domesticated rape; and grudging, conniving admiration for an unscrupulous New Woman, a more cosmetic version of the pushy dames lampooned by Thurber, and a preview of the ruthless, raunchy Women’s Libber who was on her way. Selznick might have warmed to her. Soft-faced and fastidious, he seems at last to have broken out of the dutiful son’s ...”

“... and world wars, our adaptable institutions have stood the test of time ... Domesday Book was much more than a record. It was, and still reflects, a philosophy of administration unique in Europe. It was the forerunner of all local government in this country. It was the basis on which land was distributed for profit and reward, and how this land was ...”

“... Florida,’ as Lauren Groff and I (separately) have done, perhaps a dozen years ago in her case, more than two dozen now in mine. For love and family in her case; in mine, improbably and occasionally grimly, for work. It took me a while to get used to G, as I’d like coyly to go on calling it. I started off part-time. Like Persephone, one term in two. I ...”

“... Milgram wrote: The results are terrifying and depressing. They suggest that human nature – or more specifically, the kind of character produced in American society – cannot be counted on to insulate its citizens from brutality and inhumane treatment at the direction of malevolent authority. In a naive moment some time ago, I once wondered whether in all ...”

“... From this originary powerhouse, the rest of the planet can seem very distant.In his new novel, Thomas Pynchon also puts us at a particular point in time: 1932. It’s the middle of the Great Depression – strike-breakers hired to bust heads at union marches, anarchist actions against the police, inter-mob violence – but depressing is the last thing you ...”

“... and in due course exchanged and sent home. It was a civilised business for the most part, no more than a footnote in the history of the war. In the history of Georgian polite culture, however, the capture of the Westmorland has come to be seen as a uniquely important event. The reasons for this are set out in an imaginative, subtle exhibition (until 27 ...”

“... and individually, should let them have their space. Sometimes the culture manages to do that. Thomas Pynchon is another famous recluse, not someone who grew sick of the publishing process and walked away, but someone who never took part in it. From a far distance, Pynchon’s identity seemed as mysterious and indecipherable as the Antikythera ...”

“... editor of Poetry magazine; as a girl, Mitchell met T.S. Eliot, Edna St Vincent Millay, Dylan Thomas, Ezra Pound and others. The exhibition opens with works from the 1950s, including Hemlock (named after a line from a Wallace Stevens poem) and Evenings on 73rd Street, both a mass of densely worked strokes against a nimbus of white paint, like scrawled ...”

“... executed, many of them are carefully rehearsed; ‘tags’ are done at a very different speed to more intricate pieces. It is now too late to stop calling FJCL, or the insults and slogans which are often found on the same walls, graffiti, but the word originally described marks that were scratched with a blade or a point and thus differed greatly in ...”

“... seething, silkily aggressive. There was ground to be cleared, and residents had to be deported. Thomas Hardy, with his knobbly rusticities and merry peasants, would not do. In the Nation, James complained that the novel had a ‘fatal lack of magic’, and was written in a ‘verbose and redundant style … Everything human in the book strikes us as ...”

“... The only way was down. We would wonder what had happened to that chimera. Had it been nothing more than an evanescent abstraction? A temporal analogue of Neverland? Had Laika died in vain? Moshe Safdie’s Habitat 67. Nor did we realise we were deluding ourselves that we were ‘part of it’. For this thing called The Future seems in retrospect to ...”

“... also destroyed his diaries at the end of every year. One diary – that for 1867 – was lost or, more likely, stolen in America. It resurfaced in 1943. ‘Since then,’ as Claire Tomalin puts it, ‘scholars have been squeezing it like a tiny sponge for every drop of information it can yield.’ Scholars justify their curiosity on the grounds that anything ...”

“... from Black Mountain and Objectivism to Yvor Winters and the ‘plain style’. In Britain he is more likely to be known as a deviant Movement figure, author of such books as Purity of Diction in English Verse and Articulate Energy, and as a poet who, while initially espousing Movement plainness, refused to meet his readers halfway (halfway was already too ...”