“... public figures who fell from grace: Richard Nixon, his former special counsel Charles Colson, and John Newton, the Anglican hymn-writer who once captained slave ships. Nazarbayev’s life story doesn’t have this trajectory. It is 19 years since he became his republic’s leader and his rise has not yet crested. You could say that by accepting the Kazakh ...”

“... pleased. ‘The state should not tell car companies how to run their business’: the words of Christian Streiff, the then president of Peugeot Citroën. As in the UK, the intention is to refresh the lines of credit the companies rely on, the ones available to customers at showrooms and dealerships. At the same time, the credit crunch may be masking ...”

“... Battlestar Galactica and Never Let Me Go. Futurity is represented by AI-generated poems and Christian Bök’s The Xenotext (2011-), an experimental work in progress that aims to create the world’s most durable poem by enciphering text into the DNA of the hardiest of life forms, the bacterium D. radiodurans.Histories of large, unruly concepts ...”

“... than just an academic dispute about scraps of paper in the archives,’ the Anglo-German historian John Röhl wrote in 2015. ‘It marked the point at which civil society in the Federal Republic admirably turned its back on a difficult past to embrace Western values and share its destiny with that of its neighbours. The transformation was profound and ...”

“... grew up in a working-class, largely Armenian quarter of Beirut, until his family was expelled by Christian militias at the beginning of the civil war in 1975. They resettled in the south, in the village near Tyre where his father had been born. Nasrallah shared his father’s admiration of the Iranian-born cleric Musa al-Sadr, whose Movement of the Deprived ...”

“... legal and constitutional rights. Many of these ‘dissidents’, such as Liu Junning or Yu Jie, a Christian, feature prominently in the American media’s coverage of intellectuals in China: a coverage which is often underpinned by an assumption that free markets guarantee democracy, and oscillates between describing the excesses of the authoritarian ...”

“... of amelioration to a minimum’. Much of Hardy’s mature writing can be seen as a commentary on John Stuart Mill’s essay ‘Nature’, published in 1874. Mill argues that people are always appealing to nature to make moral cases – as, for instance, when acts one disapproves of are deemed unnatural – whereas in fact nature is unmoral, blindly ...”

“... comic, with cruel Herod appearing on stage as a ridiculously boastful Oriental (emphatically non-Christian) potentate, his murdering soldiers and the frantically resisting mothers cast as slapstick characters, the horror neutralised by laughter. Kunzle finds Flemish artists such as Pieter Brueghel the Elder continuing some of this comic-horror flavour into ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... before; despite complaints, the builders and landlords, cousins called Frederick Sutton and John Dudley, hadn’t bothered to child-proof the banisters. Worse were the Palatinates’ flat roofs, designed to be used by women to dry their washing and surrounded by a low wall and railings, broken in places, easy to scale by bold children aiming to show ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”