“... let alone conspiratorial, opposition to his proceedings. Sir Thomas More died for a devoutly held principle, for which he had to die, not as a conspirator. The Observant Franciscans and Carthusians who were bloody victims of the Henrician Reformation (Elton wrote of monks who were ‘foolish enough to get themselves hanged’) were not involved in ...”

“... well as their heirs, such as T. Coraghessan Boyle, Lydia Davis, Rick Moody, William Vollmann and David Foster Wallace. None of these writers – however popular or influential, however frequently their writing appeared in the Paris Review or Conjunctions or the year-end Best American and Pushcart anthologies – managed to stir him. The ‘tone of mandarin ...”

“... At least rhetorically, at least momentarily, aesthetic autonomy and political commitment were held together. After the next world war, they would diverge again, with the celebrated debate between Adorno and Sartre only one indication of the gap.The internal politics of Surrealism were also fraught. Although purges are as common in artistic movements as in ...”

“... people who happen to carry their genes today have no moral right to repossess Neanderthal fossils held in museums. Part of the muddle stems from the seductive analogy between peoples and species. Evolutionary theory undoes the notion that a species might remain fixed over the very long term, a point that Qureshi makes beautifully in her description of the ...”

“... radios, clothing) its population demanded. Our understanding of that national economy owes much to David Edgerton, who in a smart piece on port cities explains that inner-city docks declined not just because of containerisation but also because Britain – like France – was once again growing most of its own food; when imports shot up again in the 1980s (of ...”

“... exes are a hard-publishing lot. So far we have had diaries from two of its central figures, David Blunkett and Alastair Campbell, and from a spin-doctor hanger-on (Lance Price); a memoir by its most senior diplomat, the former ambassador to Washington Sir Christopher Meyer; and now memoirs by the former prime minister’s wife, his deputy and his ...”

“... a climax to two decades in which his year had pivoted on Rome’s big March exhibition, held at the Pantheon, and its August one, at San Giovanni Decollato. Xavier Salomon, in a catalogue essay about these artist-organised events, describes Rosa reaching ‘a level of panic, over-working and exhaustion every summer, in the Roman heat’, as he ...”

“... a highly classified five-page ‘talking points’ briefing for the DIA’s deputy director, David Shedd, which stated that al-Nusra maintained a sarin production cell: its programme, the paper said, was ‘the most advanced sarin plot since al-Qaida’s pre-9/11 effort’. (According to a Defense Department consultant, US intelligence has long known ...”

“... opponent was saying exhibited the profound conviction of his own beliefs. Did not the poet King David say: ‘Let them be ashamed and confounded that seek after my soul: let them be turned backward and put to confusion, that desire my hurt’? Individualism, bordering on eccentricity, even to the extent of ‘cutting off your nose to spite your face’, has ...”

“... in this episode and others, the psychology of troops in battle. Holmes quotes Lieutenant David Tinker on his first experience, during the Falklands War, of being shelled: ‘They must be mad. Don’t they know it’s very unsafe shooting things at other people?’ A US Sergeant in Vietnam recalled: ‘You thought, “How the fuck can they do this to ...”

“... following chronologies rather than personal histories, to a part of the California scene they are held to oppose, but with which they share an uncannily similar history. I’m thinking of the Grateful Dead. In the musical-historical imagination – with its New York v. California, but especially its punk v. hippie oppositions – the Dead ought to be the ...”

“... It is ‘boarded up, freighted … hoisted into a ship’, ‘pawed about’ by sailors, bumped, held up and hassled, ‘till at length it arrives at its destination, tired out and jaded, from a brisk sentiment into a feature of silly pride or tawdry senseless affectation’. This stretching of everyday meaning for comic effect is a feature of Dickens’s ...”

“... rather than padlock themselves to the gates of Downing Street. Strangest of all, in September 2015 David Cameron wrote to the Conservative leader of Oxfordshire County Council to complain about cuts it had recently announced: I was disappointed at the long list of suggestions floated in the briefing note to make up significant cuts to frontline services ...”

“... simply, on the novel’s first page, do you want the schoolboy Charles Bovary’s trousers to be held up by braces, or do you want his pants to be held up by suspenders? The decisions, and the colouration, are irrevocable. So we might fantasise the translator of our dreams: someone, naturally, who admires the novel and its ...”