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“... and trajectory of Sendero’s revolution. It is the achievement of these books, particularly Simon Strong’s, to rip off the tags and subject the contents of the box to rational argument and analysis. The roots of the revolution stretch back to the legendary barbarity of Pizarro’s conquest, beginning with the murder of the Inca Atahualpa and the ...”

“... values and customs. In novels by most heterosexuals, and by many homosexuals as well, there is a strong tendency to portray ‘queer’ men as evil seducers or else as capering clowns. ‘The homosexual hero’, on the other hand, since he is presented by authors sympathetic to homosexuality, makes serious proclamation (and boy, oh boy, does he proclaim) of ...”

“... Weland the goldsmith      knew grief’s weight. That strong-minded man      was no stranger to misery, his loyal soul-mates      were sorrow and longing, a hurt like winter      weathered his heart once Niðhad had hamstrung      and hobbled his hopes, fettering the feet      of the worthier fellow ...”

“... French, they use the word ‘Cartesian’. But they ought rather to say ‘Laplacian’. Pierre Simon Laplace was born into a prosperous rural family in 1749; he trained for the priesthood; and in 1773 was elected to the Académie. He had recently composed a series of astonishingly assured calculations about the application of probability calculus to the ...”

“... rather than to far-flung travel, that ‘Chinese’ in the title refers. The haunted narrator, Simon, tells us a story which is exotic or romantic only in his head, but is intriguingly so there. Daydreams and hallucinations unsettlingly alternate with sharp noticings. In a seeming paradox he ‘reads the thoughts’ of a fellow passenger on the Tube as ...”

“... a pleasure to read. An admirer of ancient Rome and of Britain, he was insistent on the need for a strong (but strictly constitutional) executive authority to steer Spanish America (with its caste-conscious, multi-ethnic societies, omnipresent poverty and illiteracy, and immersion in the authoritarian traditions of the Spanish Empire) towards a more liberal ...”

“... public events where others might be either awestruck or importuning. From time to time you get a strong impression that both men are having a laugh, though I don’t think Coetzee is joking when he spends a page demonstrating that ‘the equation “I = JMC” is false,’ or when he writes: One can think of a life in art, schematically, in two or perhaps ...”

“... On the day Simon Hayward was released from a Swedish prison and returned to England, the Independent reported that a senior official in the Swedish Justice Department had declared himself against punishing convicts who attempt to escape from prison, because it is ‘a natural reaction’: ‘If you were in a prison,’ he asked a seminar, ‘wouldn’t you start thinking of how to get out?’ The absurd reasonableness of this approach to prisoner care is in a way typical of what the world has come to expect from Sweden’s judicial system, and until quite recently it would have been met, at least among the liberal-minded, with a kind of sniggering admiration for a society which dared radically to question the orthodoxies of crime and punishment ...”

“... cross-culturally, and the debate has become increasingly passionate and confused. There is a strong set of vested interests involved in any modern definition. This is most clearly seen when magic is opposed to religion. When Moses appears before Pharaoh in Exodus and has Aaron instigate the plague of frogs, the Egyptian court magicians promptly do the ...”

“... At the end of a work comparing the first three Bourbon kings, the duc de Saint-Simon invites us to make a final judgment between them, and to be persuaded that the precise truth has guided every stroke of his pen. With characteristic dexterity, he couples this nuanced claim to objectivity with the suggestion that it has only been achieved by subordinating his feelings of ‘just gratitude’ towards Louis XIII ...”

“... government debt to GDP ratio as soon as possible. For the moment he appears secure in his job (the strong rumour before the election was that May would sack him once she had won a clear victory), so ending austerity would require him to eat his words. The more serious political issue, however, is the Tories’ reputation for economic credibility. Cameron and ...”

“... and writing and figuring before being trained as carpenters or plumbers or pastry-chefs … He is strong on discipline, character-building, team sports.’ Fabricante appears one afternoon when David is playing football and invites him and his friends to play a match at the orphanage. The burly orphans walk all over them – Simón calls the match ‘a ...”

“... comes from Katharina herself, who sets down – with the help of her literate legal guardian, Simon – what she calls her ‘truest testimony’ as a way of getting the facts straight ahead of her court appearance. Interspersed through her narrative are Simon’s reflections on the case, obsequious letters to the False ...”

“... Simon Armitage likes to have it both ways. He is the streetwise poet who is at home in a Radio 1 studio; but he is also the ambitious literary figure who aspires to ‘nothing less’ than a Nobel Prize. He is at ease with youth culture (‘I didn’t have a classical education of any type, so I tend to use characters from popular culture’), yet, far from stoking rebellion, he writes tenderly of his parents and looks up to Ted Hughes and W ...”

“... about the attribution.One of the two owners identified at the time, an art dealer named Robert Simon, did produce a press release before the exhibition opened, ‘summarising the ownership, critical and conservation history of the painting’, as he now puts it. In this he rather coyly stated that the picture was ‘privately owned and not for sale’ and ...”