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“... Helen​ Phillips’s disconcerting new novel starts on a note of thrillerish urgency. Molly, at home alone with her small children, hears footsteps in the other room. She clasps them to her, though she needs to move away from them if she is to defend them. Ben, the baby, is too young to feel a sense of emergency, but Viv, at three, is old enough both to co-operate and to do the opposite of what she’s told ...”

“... where primary texts are easily available, some weak French. The index is particularly slipshod. Adam Phillips’s edition of Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) is on a smaller scale, and does not pretend to supersede the standard edition by James Boulton. But it is concisely and efficiently ...”

“... more than 170 countries.One of the virtues of this intelligent and well-researched book by Andrew Phillips and Jason Sharman is that it provides long and wide historical contexts in which such questions can be posed. The authors’ central argument is that ‘some of the most important actors in the crucial formative stages of the modern international system ...”

“... and forward just a touch, her left leg braced under a sidling hip.The celebrity appearances by Adam and Saints James, John (Evangelist) and Peter take the form of little soul-flames, like the others, distinguished only by the tags inscribed beside them. The couple converse and pass on. We see the last of them as they rise through the river of light (Canto ...”

“... at every thing he tried but that is not the point: the point is that he could do the things that Adam Smith said his economic Frankenstein’s monster could not. He could imagine virtue and form clear notions of private and public duty. He could live. In Scotland, where almost everybody but the Dukes of Argyll feels they must fight their way in the ...”

“... at intervals of seven years. In 20 Sites n Years, a different sort of documentary project, Tom Phillips set out in 1973 to take pictures of twenty London streets on (roughly) the same day every year, at the same time of day and from the same position. There is only incidental human presence in the images, and at first the succession of years gives an ...”

“... of the Victorian age is ‘Away in a manger’ (anonymous), with ‘O little town of Bethlehem’ (Phillips Brooks) and ‘Dear Lord and Father of mankind’ (John Greenleaf Whittier) as runners-up. Among the works of the canonical English poets, the lines known to most people are probably those beginning Blake’s Milton, ‘And did those feet in ancient time ...”

“... ones, where Bellow suddenly drops out of the race, as when he sends stamps to his son. ‘Dear Adam – Here are some stamps. Countries sometimes disappear and leave nothing behind but some postage stamps. But Papas and Adams go on and on.’ He much prefers sparring with a big and capable admirer like Leon Wieseltier than passing on news to his ...”

“... suspects, could have given as much pleasure to Kandinsky as that of the index fingers of God and Adam). Nevertheless, by comparison with the sketch’s transformation of the life of nature into the life of paint, the exhibition picture is only wonderful theatre. Like virtually all the other finished set-pieces, it doesn’t begin to have the utter ...”

“... visible at the Tate is as close as the very late Farmhouse near the Water’s Edge in the Phillips Collection, Washington, with its tangled branches of soaring trees, its flickering white threads of paint, the earthiness of its dirty greens and browns, its spiky undergrowth, the rockiness of its underlying rhythms, its tempestuousness, its specific ...”

“... colour remains true of the best of Blake’s later achievements in painting: true to God Judging Adam and Hecate and The House of Death, or the intricate tonal mosaic of David Delivered out of Many Waters, or the delicate spacemaking colour of The Death of the Virgin, or the brutal symmetries of The Blasphemer. Nonetheless, it is still the case that between ...”

“... made him see red. Jews and the high finance.’Buchan’s biographers, starting with Janet Adam Smith in 1965, tend to hold up this turnaround as evidence that he wasn’t an antisemite. They point to his handful of Jewish friends, to his Zionism – a cause he learned about from his friend Arthur Balfour, who set him on the path of writing thrillers ...”

“... In this way, one could be both a devout Christian and a scientist, as William Buckland and Adam Sedgwick, the two leading British geologists of the 19th century, were. Of course, biblical literalism resurged periodically, notably in the US. But the majority of scientists just got on with their geology, leaving others to worry about its implications for ...”