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“... are metaphorical, miracles are publicity, designed to launch a new religion, whose main point lay elsewhere. ‘Jesus is our Saviour,’ let’s leave it at that. Or are you finally one of the countless multitude who don’t consider themselves Christian, but not atheist either, one of those who vaguely sympathise? All that stuff about virgins and ...”

“... The trouble Nozick (like other ‘speculative’ philosophers – Hegel, Whitehead, John Findlay, Paul Weiss) runs into here is that while explaining in the positivist’s strong ‘testable’ sense is obviously too much to expect of philosophers, explaining in Nozick’s weaker sense looks much too easy. Suppose that we want, as Nozick rightly says we do, a ...”

“... wife, Lesley Balfour Dunn, in March 1981, and they love and celebrate her as she lived and as she lay dying. I first met Lesley in 1968 and I last saw her a fortnight before her death – wasted, heroic, witty and ‘turning down painkillers for lucidity’, as Dunn writes in a poem which remembers the friends who called at the house in the final ...”

“... Masters of the Prieuré de Sion. They had found grounds for thinking that some other institution lay behind the foundation both of the Templars and the Cistercians, and this they tentatively identified with the Prieuré de Sion, an order whose headquarters was the Abbaye de Notre Dame de Mont Sion in the Frankish kingdom of Jerusalem at the beginning of the ...”

“... transcend comment. On the steps of Turin cathedral on 13 April of this year. Pope John Paul concluded a morose diatribe on the emptiness and malignity of modern capitalist society with a ringing proclamation: ‘But there is Christ and he is sufficient for all time.’ Three centuries or so earlier, Blaise Pascal summarised the theme of his apology ...”

“... for principle and button-holes’. And it is at Brummell’s well-shod feet that we can lay not only the tradition of dandyism, but the Great Masculine Renunciation itself, the turn away from pomp and ornament and finery which gave us the Savile Row suit. Hollander gives J.C. Flugel’s theory of the Great Masculine Renunciation short shrift. She ...”

“... dying out unnoticed. The Codex Regius of Eddic poetry, greatest memorial of Northern literature, lay unknown to the rest of the world in an Icelandic farmhouse for some four hundred years till Bishop Brynjólfur Sveinsson acquired it in 1643. Then the news began, slowly, to leak out. The OED records ‘Viking’ as a word first used in 1807, and it had been ...”

“... the gutter. When at last he impassively joined his wife, he sat Lulu next to her while he himself lay recumbent at their feet. The taxi-driver, like the man Magritte had kicked some thirty years before, was so thrown by this ‘solution’ that he drove off without a word. Such behaviour, while diverting, is not so very surprising. What I did find mildly out ...”

“... sparingness in the matter of language perished with him. He died in 1941, just when Jean-Paul Sartre, homo loquax made flesh, was launching unscrupulously out on the seven hundred pages of L’Etre et le néant. And, fresh from reading Bergson, I find it frustrating that his sociable brevity, and the even more sociable clarity that went with ...”

“... school exercise book and becomes the conduit for a writerly correspondence; a disregarded copy of Paul Bowles’s Let it Come Down lolls on the counter of a pub, a gift already regretted; another gift, received from a stranger by the 17-year-old narrator while she is working on checkout 19 at the local supermarket, sits unopened by the till:I put the book on ...”

“... manners . . . so ancien régime’. Lévi-Strauss, meeting him afterwards on the Capitaine Paul Lemerle, expected to be intimidated and found himself before a ‘principled old maid’: ‘That hairless face, those fine features, that light voice combined with the stiff, fussy manners, presented the almost asexual character I was later to recognise in ...”

“... the four Hoke Moseley books he wrote in the 1980s, has just been announced in the US; it will star Paul Giamatti, the shlub from Sideways. It’s really good casting. Willeford is adored by his peers and big-deal crime writers like Donald Westlake and Lawrence Block praise his work. ‘Nobody,’ Elmore Leonard said, ‘writes a better crime novel than Charles ...”

“... diamonds and pearls. Confident that my every word would be welcome, if not infinitely precious, I lay in my hospital bed with a happily expectant air. It’s hard not to see Updike’s tremendous output – more than sixty books over five decades – as the fulfilment of a filial quest. Linda had a bad temper, and administered ‘stinging ...”

“... a prominent role in the suppression of the Irish rebellion of 1798, whose ideological origins lay in the radicalism of Presbyterian Belfast, but which developed a curious sectarian momentum, becoming in many respects a Roman Catholic revolt. The rebellion raised union to the top of the political agenda, though Castlereagh had already begun to contemplate ...”

“... correction of ‘many manifest errors’ was important, the editors say, but ‘the greater task lay in the restoration through emendation of the syntactical coherence of individual sentences as they underwent periodic amplification under the writer’s revising hand.’ And again: ‘Overwhelmingly, the changes pertain to the syntax (the flow of the ...”