“... 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 ...”

“... old as Marcuse’s 1937 essay on ‘The Affirmative Character of Culture’ and as contemporary as David Lloyd and Paul Thomas’s 1998 Culture and the State – that such a culture, when it is officially sponsored by even the most benevolent and enlightened state, may easily serve to maintain a very non-utopian status quo. If there is an embarrassing absence ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... owed and the need for reparative histories and restorative justice are increasingly, though by no means universally, recognised. In the mid to late 18th century, Francis Williams, a poet, scientist and free African Jamaican who had lived in England in the 1720s, became the subject of intense debate among Enlightenment men, including ...”

“... to share the same monarch as England, but was free to make its own choice of a successor. As a means of resolving the succession crisis, commissioners from England and Scotland negotiated the incorporation of England and Scotland in a new Kingdom of Great Britain, which adhered to the Hanoverian succession. While the difficult ratification process in the ...”

“... Shargel, talking to the New Yorker: ‘The guy can be guilty as hell, but if I win an acquittal it means there was something infirm or wrong with the prosecution’s case, and they weren’t entitled to the conviction.’ On their view, the acquittal even of hardened and violent criminals whose liberty puts innocent people at risk is a price which society ...”

“... in Orange Is the New Black who has truly taken on the mantle of presenting to the world what it means to be a black, incarcerated, transsexual woman. Cox also insists that, even now she has the money, she won’t undergo surgery to feminise her face. Jenner’s facial surgery lasted ten hours and led to her one panic attack: ‘What did I just do? What did ...”

“... 1936 to Beijing in 2008. Engines of regeneration. Orgies of lachrymose nationalism. War by other means. Warrior-athletes watched, from behind dark glasses, by men in suits and uniforms. The pharmaceutical frontline. Rogue Californian chemists running their eye-popping, vein-clustered, vest-stripping robots against degendered state laboratory freaks. Bearded ...”

“... the point of all this sport-watching? What is it for? I even had a title, drawn from a remark David Sexton, the literary editor of the Evening Standard, once made to me. ‘I’m not interested in sport,’ he said, ‘but I often wish I were, given that the mind is always in pain.’ The mind is always in pain … Yes, given that, you can easily see why ...”

“... me.The Ghost Writer was automatically described in the press as ‘autobiographical’ – which means about Roth’s personal history – because the narrator, Nathan Zuckerman, is an American-Jewish writer, my age, born in Newark, whose earliest writing elicits a protest from some Jewish readers. But as a matter of fact, that about constitutes the ...”