“... of Muslim rule, many, perhaps most, of the eastern Christians (Greek Orthodox, Syrians, Armenians) may have remained Christian, though many were now Arabic-speakers. Tyerman attributes a key role to these eastern Christian communities, who he surmises mostly lived quite happily as tax-payers under Latin Christian rule, as they had done under Muslim ...”

“... sharp commentator on her previous life and lifestyle in Britain. Fifty years in America may not entirely have changed the way she wrote and, presumably, spoke, but it certainly made her background seem increasingly distant. True, she never quite lost the knack of blending into British elite society; in fact, she had such a romantic attachment to the ...”

“... and took up 16 full columns in the Times, the longest single dispatch in the paper’s history. In May 1936, he entered Addis Ababa with the triumphant Italian army, and saw ‘an imperial capital in ruins – buildings still burning, the stinking dead still lying in the streets, gutted houses and stores gaping blackly and emptily at us as we drove by’. His ...”

“... contentious in a cultural history that should be about how and why things change. McLaren’s book may be about attitudes and meanings, causes and cures, but impotence is something that comes, as it were, in the form of differing descriptions, that has had various meanings attached to it; and though these meanings have consequences, the condition seems ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... because I think a General Government necessary for us, and there is no Form of Government but what may be a Blessing to the People if well administered; and I believe farther that this is likely to be well administered for a Course of Years and can only end in Despotism as other Forms have done before it when the People shall become so corrupted as to need ...”

“... his reply to Burke in ‘an octavo form so as to confine it probably to that class of readers who may consider it coolly’ (that is, people who would be unlikely to approve of it), but that as soon as it was published more ‘cheaply for dissemination among the populace’ (that is, among people who would agree with it), he would be prosecuted. A year ...”

“... at best, indiscreetly passed along and, at worst, brazenly stolen like fire from the gods, that it may bring warmth and light to others. By this transforming theft, both the narrator and Wolff demonstrate their ...”

“... What Death of a Salesman can’t be is a play about whether reality is real. Willy Loman may well be – as Bigsby argues – a man ‘finally unable to separate reality from appearance’, but we only know that because we can. Miller found a highly original way of dramatising the gap between the American dream and its achievement, and did it so ...”

“... moving in any direction’. He called one of his long sequences ‘Liquid Mercury’. ‘Any word may be as beautiful as water so long as it is free of restraints,’ he wrote. In an interview with the translator Simon Patton, he said: I thought the important thing about language at that time was not to change its form, not a question of how you used it ...”

“... present, horror and hilarity, with Nomi’s biting wit enhancing the ambient lunacy. The Nickels may be avatars of prelapsarian bliss, but the rest of their town is loco. Melancholia, suicide, a gulag stupefaction – even the weather, in best Last Days fashion, is moonstruck. It all feels absurdly melodramatic until we gradually realise that Nomi’s happy ...”

“... recorded by an observer with Médecins sans Frontières – were common in Rwanda in April and May 1994, when Hutu extremists butchered up to a million people, mainly Tutsis but also Hutu moderates who were seen as ‘sell-outs’. The small United Nations force under Major-General Roméo Dallaire and the gallant contingent of the International Committee ...”

“... moments when a trip to the back of the book does not explain what is going on at the front. Pigman may have fallen for Gascoigne’s habitual trick of tempting readers to impute factual origins to his verse when he assumes that the complaints composed in the voice of women were ‘written for a particular person’. Ventriloquism was surely his ...”

“... made for the people can be taken over by them: no wonder it’s so conspicuously policed. It may not be coincidence that the square makes the city look more like Beijing: Chengdu, the capital of a province that is about the size of France, is a regional power, competing with a handful of other cities to be the dominant force in western China. This ...”

“... politics were more or less quietist. In his letters he sometimes expressed himself in terms which may yet earn him a place in the Modernist sin bin of Professor John Carey (‘I personally have no sympathy with the masses … They are fools … If anything, I hate the masses. I have lived with them, and I have smelled their dirty breaths and bleak minds ...”