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“... have big ideas.’ The old Clause IV, a plainly expressed commitment to common ownership of the means of production, is replaced by an unctuous formula which promises everything and nothing at the same time. The shift of language disguises a U-turn in political direction. The demand for a publicly directed economy becomes a demand for a ‘dynamic ...”

“... Royal Court. Isabelle Torrance insists on tragic drama’s deep religious roots. The word tragedy means ‘goat song’, and although we don’t know exactly why, it probably alludes to the drama’s ritual, even sacrificial origins. Robert Cowan remarks that tragedy ‘was born under tyranny but flowered under democracy’, though Mitchell Greenberg notes ...”

“... but say Wilson was a piece of more relish.’ I’m embarrassed to say that I think I know what he means: what gives me most pleasure in Wilson’s paintings is the combination of the tactility of his foregrounds – rocks, roads, the bark of trees – and a weightless delicacy, for example in the transparency of his foliage against the sky. In Wilson’s ...”

“... literary company. Between the lines, you glimpse a lovable character bursting with curiosity: a David Attenborough of the cultural world, taking pleasure in every manifestation of symbolic activity from the humblest to the most magnificent. (He even embraced some snarky barbs directed at him by Heidegger and his students.) This congenial impression is ...”

“... Hamas controlled the zakat committees the HLF used and that by distributing humanitarian aid by means of those committees, the HLF had helped Hamas win the ‘hearts and minds’ of the Palestinian people. None of the seven committees identified as suspect by the prosecution had ever been proscribed as a terrorist organisation and no one connected with them ...”

“... he was 45 and she was 25. Cavendish was the daughter of the Duke of Devonshire, a cousin of Lord David Cecil, et cetera, and became a lady-in-waiting to Princess Margaret – the next best thing, perhaps, to Betjeman bagging a royal. His relationship with Cavendish was clearly one of the most important in his life, but the reader is left to infer from ...”

“... nest in the Mojave desert, naturalists found 250 baby tortoise shells. The success of the raven means the failure of other species, also valuable, so the very sight of these creatures, especially in new places – like outside my window – is ominous. Tortoises are sacred to some of the Mojave’s local tribes, while the raven is, in the mythology of the ...”

“... a frequently bloody vengeance that will end the cycle but at a heavy cost. As the Freud-inspired David Quint has argued, this is the dilemma that confronts the central character of the Aeneid. The first part of Virgil’s epic portrays a retrogressive Aeneas, whose boat turns about, who seeks to found a simulacrum of Troy and who wishes for the death that ...”

“... about the brief moment of joy he felt when he saw the planes fly into the twin towers – ‘David beating Goliath’ – at which point ‘you’ (Liev Schreiber) turns firm and Bruce Willis-like and says: ‘and you wonder why your family is being threatened.’ Changez is seen giving a lecture at Lahore University and bellowing ‘We will wipe the ...”

“... for the episodes, or tell us that the cast of O’Dea’s Your Man consisted of Jimmy O’Dea and David Kelly, or that Th’Oul Lad of Kilsalaher featured Danny Cummins and Máire Hastings. All a bit half-hearted. I can find only one video clip online of Flann O’Brien being interviewed, from 1964. It’s astonishingly depressing – the man is so ...”

“... Americans seem to relish Presidential biographies. David McCullough’s Truman (1992) was on the bestseller lists for the better part of a year, and his John Adams (2001) is providing an astonishing repeat performance. Robert Caro’s dramatically detailed look at The Years of Lyndon Johnson has been unfolding since 1982, and large chunks of Volume Three have been serialised in the New Yorker ...”

“... way of Brian Greene’s very successful The Elegant Universe, a book which covers some, but by no means all, of the same ground as Smolin. Indeed, the two complement each other nicely, for anyone who wants to understand, in more than a superficial way, what is currently happening to the deep conceptual foundations of physics. At this level of enquiry, physics ...”

“... arrived in 1778, it was home to some 300,000 people. The archipelago that Darwin visited was by no means virginal, nonetheless. Two hundred of Ecuador’s criminals were held in a penal settlement on Charles Island (modern Floreana); mariners had introduced domestic animals, notably goats, to several islands; and the practice of stocking up with giant ...”

“... opinions married to a successful businessman. (Florence’s mother has been a friend of Elizabeth David and is a friend of Iris Murdoch.) Both stories are set at a very precise date, with debates about socialism, Britain’s decline as a world power, and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Both works exude a sense, alive in McEwan’s work since The Child ...”

“... of folly and murder.’ In his celebration of the West, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations (1998), David Landes contemptuously describes 19th-century Latin American states as having ‘republican trappings’ that unsuccessfully disguised the reality of societies dominated by ‘a small group of rascals’ while ‘the masses squatted and scraped.’ Even ...”