“... example, author, with her husband, of My Boy Jack? The Search for Kipling’s Only Son (1998). (John Kipling died in his first half-hour in action – at the age of 18 – at Loos in 1915. Though his stricken father carried on a 20-year search for his grave, his remains were not found until 1992.) When not writing, the Holts run a sprightly operation known ...”

“... calling ‘Theobald’s Road’, ‘Tibbles Road’. Interestingly, the Oxford Dictionary of Christian Names supports both Pope and the bus conductors, pointing out that Teobaldus or Theobaldus is the Latin form of the name for which Tebald or Tibald is the vernacular; it refers to Shakespeare’s Tybalt, cites the surnames Tibbald and Tibbles, and ...”

“... work of MFA graduates and/or instructors), divided into three main groups: ‘technomodernism’ (John Barth, Thomas Pynchon), ‘high cultural pluralism’ (Toni Morrison, Sandra Cisneros) and ‘lower-middle-class modernism’ (Raymond Carver, Joyce Carol Oates), with Venn diagrams illustrating the overlap between these groups, and their polarisation by ...”

“... we were all such boys.’ This is how I remember my early days working for the BBC in the 1960s. John Fortune, John Bird, Keith Waterhouse and Willis Hall: we were all such boys too and it seemed such play. Less play was Beyond the Fringe, but that had its sillier side. Dudley Moore had an act – never, I think, done in ...”

“... quality – a little like Weegee’s – at once random and composed. In one, the circus director John Ringling North dominates the right half of the frame, shouting instructions to an unseen person, while above and to the left a high-wire act has two showgirls suspended from the wheels of a bicycle: the picture frame is divided by a balancing bar carried by ...”

“... curator of the museum – the ‘Wonder House’. The curator is a tribute to Kipling’s father, John Lockwood Kipling, who moved to Bombay as curator of the J.J. School of Art in 1865, the year of Kipling’s birth. But through the figure of the curator, Kipling also indirectly acknowledges the existence of a colonial India of intellectual collaboration ...”

“... whom he confesses ‘a strange liking’ – his most influential model, or imaginative icon, is John Bunyan, whose life and work obsess him. Bunyan is ‘this dreamer and penman’, ‘the most prominent man of letters as far as English literature is concerned’, who had ‘the tinker’s power of reaching the heart’ – there is a hint of rural ...”

“... a Norwegian Bible translator has written a book about the end of the world. I might say he was a Christian, a man who once saw Jesus in the floorboards of his Swedish apartment; a writer who, in an essay about art, pondered the unmistakable image of Christ in a photo of a man’s scrotum. I could tell you that he’s scared of both snakes and genetically ...”

“... which managed to reject Christianity and indeed religion as a whole without reverting to the pre-Christian world of classical antiquity. In the third generation, the family heirlooms passed to Lessing, Jefferson, Kant and Turgot: high-minded idealists who moved valiantly if sometimes rashly into the field of politics, meeting with many successes in the ...”

“... It probably doesn’t help that the IPs we get to hear about are usually the celebrities: Elton John and David Furnish; Annie Leibovitz; Kim Kardashian and Kanye West. Surrogacy is one of those subjects on which ‘colour-blind – white – feminism’ tends not to mince words. ‘A human-rights violation’, the journalist Julie Bindel called it in 2018 ...”

“... bodes Mischief, when ever it appears.’ Combining with ideas about the function and virtues of Christian women, this view ensured the near total exclusion of women from the burgeoning educational institutions, from schools, universities, societies and libraries, and from the pursuits for which higher education was necessary. (It is easy to forget how ...”

“... possible without its layers and hyperlinks, the infinite opportunities it opens for research: on John Amos Comenius, for example, whose idea of ‘pansophism … a dream of information available to everyone’ she discusses as a precursor to ‘Wikipedia, which I admire and support’. In The Books of Jacob, the news about the mycelial origins of the world ...”

“... is not what many people felt in 1985.Of all those who gave evidence, one figure really stands out. Christian von Wernich was a priest and police chaplain. Later, in 2006, he would be charged with murder and kidnapping as part of the military repression, and in 2007 he would be sentenced to life imprisonment. But appearing before the court in 1985, he was a ...”

“... no private fortune. He would have been Master of Balliol if he had not been struck down. No Christian faith to support him. A very harrowing visit. My vision of myself pursuing an academic career did not last long, though as a postgraduate I was supervised by the Medieval historian K.B. McFarlane, who had, incidentally, shared a flat with Pares when ...”

“... was recognised, but also accepted as the work of inevitable, evolutionary fate; the humane, Christian response was about soothing the dying pillow. The condition of the first Australians takes up less space in Australians: 1888 than in other volumes, but the findings of Henry Reynolds’s chapter on the subject are incisive: for most of the ...”