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“... be mistaken, as A Lifetime on Clouds was described to me, for the work of an Australian Catholic Philip Roth.If that were the case, however fine Tamarisk Row and its successor are (and they are), it’s unlikely you’d be reading this essay. Murnane’s international reputation, which has grown to speculations of a Nobel, rests on his novels and stories of ...”

“... lasted for a century or so, until the western Roman Empire limped to its end in the course of one short generation. Both silver and small change ceased to be minted, but the solidus and especially its one-third fraction, the tremissis, formed a thread between classical antiquity and the Latin Middle Ages. The story is similar, if somewhat more complicated, in ...”

“... theories of The Da Vinci Code and the bestselling soi-disant historical studies that inspired them.Philip Almond surveys the torrent of claims and counterclaims in theological and popular literature across two millennia and sets out to show that Mary Magdalene has always represented ‘the sinner we should aspire not to be and the saint we should desire to ...”

“... marital devotion and hints of what was to come. Early in December 1884, he wrote a brief note to Philip Griffiths, a 20-year-old from a wealthy family in Birmingham: ‘My dear Philip, I have sent a photo of myself for you to the care of Mr MacKay which I hope you will like and in return for it you are to send me one of ...”

“... of influential mavericks – from Nabokov and Henry Miller to William Burroughs, James Baldwin, Philip Roth and the Beats – had been chipping away at the old taboos. But it still took courage to challenge the stultifying pieties of middlebrow culture. Being a woman didn’t help. (Does it ever?) Over the course of an admittedly strange and somewhat ...”

“... but someone decided to add extra pointed drama to the occasion – probably the abbot himself, Philip Ballard alias Hawford (medieval Benedictines tended to acquire a second monastic surname, often the place they had come from). The life of a monastery centres on worship, an intricate performance of chanted services rhythmically punctuating every day of ...”

“... referred to his rebel forces as the ‘Khmers noirs’. At the time, French public opinion made short shrift of small-scale military interventions in Africa. In June 1992 I alerted readers to what the Libération headline called ‘The Elysée’s Secret War’ in Rwanda – a deployment which had not been debated in parliament and had received almost no ...”

“... from his collected works, however unflattering a light it casts on him. What is going on? A short extract from Advertisements for Myself explains the method in this madness: ‘I have been running for American President these last ten years in the privacy of my mind,’ the author says in a rare first-person appearance. ‘The sour truth is that I am ...”

“... loyal support of the Crown during the Jacobite rebellion of 1745, and they engaged the lawyer Philip Carteret Webb. The Jewish Naturalisation Act (the ‘Jew Bill’) was finally passed in May 1753, but during the general election of the following year it became a focus for City, High Church and Tory opposition. ‘Here, for the first time in English ...”

“... both of broad issue and of instructive detail, in this volume than I can possibly indicate in a short review. The separate chapters, on topics as diverse as ‘The Development of Commercial Science Journals in Victorian Britain’ or ‘The Changing Appearance of Research Journals in Science and Technology’, will take their place as distinctive ...”

“... So Peterloo was incorporated into the Liberal as well as the Chartist pedigree: in 1874 a short account of it was published in Manchester as a Liberal election leaflet, and ‘Peterloo’ was the inscription on a memorial jug that John Bright preserved at One Ash throughout his life. Nor is the line from Hunt to Chartism as clear or as simple as ...”

“... have ever been settled. Whether arranged alphabetically by first line, like The ‘Garland’ of Philip, or by subject and date, like Verse and Worse and The Stuffed Owl, the Anthology has always seemed less than the sum of its parts. Indeed its Byzantine title concedes a pleasing serendipity: anthoi, logia, ‘a gathering of flowers’. The Elizabethans may ...”

“... with the attempted secession of eastern Nigeria. Food assistance undoubtedly saves lives in the short run, but in the longer term it is just as likely to prolong hostilities by becoming entangled with the war economy. ‘Most thoughtful relief workers see humanitarian action as a neutral stop-gap,’ de Waal writes, but ‘for the victims of famine, it can ...”

“... the hero travels to Hades to find that death has undone all the pointless hierarchies of life: Philip of Macedon is stitching rotten sandals to earn money, Xerxes is begging, and so on. But the point is made clear earlier on, when Menippus tells us that, on earth, things have become sadly inverted: ‘On observation I found these same people practising the ...”

“... Mind first came out, Robert Paul Wolff, then a professor of philosophy at Amherst, wrote a short review in Academe, the journal of the American Association of University Professors. Let me quote from his prescient opening staves: Aficionados of the modern American novel have learned to look to Philip Roth for ...”