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Polytheists knew exactly what religiones were: they were precise ways of worshipping the gods, which one neglected at one’s peril… But philosophy and morality owed little to religio- to the cult of the gods. They were thought of as human activities, developed over the ages by human beings… What was surprising to contemporaries about the Christian Church was the extent to which activities were fused into one.

..an obvious shortcoming in the Good Friday Agreement..there was no provision for the creation of any sort of truth-and-reconciliation mechanism that might allow the people of Northern Ireland to address the sometimes murky and often painful history of what had befallen their country over the previous three decades,

After a ruckus with Prince Lichnowsky, legend has it that B. wrote to him:Prince! What you are, you are by circumstance and birth. What I am, I am through myself. Of princes there have been and will be thousands. Of Beethovens there is only one.
Probably too good to be true, but a great story.

A day or so before the concert Ries had arrived at Beethoven's flat at dawn to assist him and found him in bed scribbling on sheets of paper. "What is it?" Ries asked. "Trombones" Beethoven said.

In itself, the Regulating Act (1773) did little to muzzle the worst excesses of the EIC, but it did create a precedent, and it marked the beginning of a steady process of state interference in the Company that would ultimately end in its nationalisation eighty years later, in 1858.

The world's first aggressive multinational corporation was saved by one of history's first mega-bailouts, an early example of a nation state extracting, as its price for saving a failing corporation, the right to regulate it and rein it in. But despite much parliamentary rhetoric, the EIC still remained a semi-autonomous imperial power in its own right, albeit one now partially incorporated within the state...

'Through many unexpected contingencies, an incorporated society of private traders (has become) a cabinet of Asiatic princes.' The result was what Adam Smith would call 'a strange absurdity' - a Company State.

Barnes restores my faith: not in mankind, no, but in reading.

"Well, now I know that your sixties feel the same as all the other ages, and your seventies. You never stop being yourself on the inside, whatever age people think you are by looking at you from the outside."

Oh, thank all the stars for Ali Smith. She restores my faith.

"The Dead Man Moving in the Forest"
More like: the dead story scrabbling in the undergrowth.

Well, Olga Tokarsczuk was always going to be a hard act to follow.

Sometimes he thought of a woman's existence as a sort of mask that she puts on as soon as she's born, enabling her to go through life in camouflage, never fully revealing herself to anyone. He reckoned they didn't ask the questions they ought to ask.

He became a proper clairvoyant when his wife died. It looked as if it was she who had kept him down to earth and grounded his every thought, his every presentiment. She was like a powerful atmospheric depression that squeezes every puff of smoke out of chimneys and casts winter smogs over cities. She controlled his thoughts by magic, forcing them to concentrate on queuing in the shops, weeding the beetroots...

One book leads to another: Baron von Innstetten requires satisfaction, and who does Major Crampas choose as his second? Buddenbrook.

"And he realized that the aim of his writing was to reconcile all possible time scales, places and landscapes into one single image that would remain fixed, never ageing or changing."

Even the chapter titles are a delight. Who could resist NOW PAY ATTENTION

For most of the deputies and for the people of Paris, there could be no doubt that the murder (of Marat by Charlotte Corday) was directly ordered by the Girondins who had escaped to Normandy. It appeared inconceivable to the male leadership that a woman could plan and perform such an act on her own.

With the king eliminated, the conspiracy obsession would focus more than ever before on potential enemies among the patriots themselves. Indeed, there was a certain truth in Mercier's observation: "It was because they had cut off the head of Louis XVI that they were emboldened to cut off those of their colleagues."

"The majority (of the nobility) had imbibed an ideology centered on 'race' and 'blood' and the undoubting assumption that they were biologically superior members of society-a persuasion that ran directly counter to the basic assumptions of the Enlightenment."
Why has this idea regained currency some two hundred years later????

Paul and Susan meet at the tennis club: ‘Does your husband play?’
‘My husband? Mr E.P.?’ She laughed. ‘No. Golf’s his game. I think it’s plain unsporting to hit a stationary ball. Don’t you agree?’

"...bantering is of another dimension altogether. For one thing, how would one know for sure at any given moment a response of the bantering sort is truly what is expected? One need hardly dwell on the catastrophic possibility of uttering a bantering remark only to discover it wholly inappropriate."

https://web.archive.org/web/200703201...

"... car le fanatisme des intérêts équilibra les délires du besoin, l'aristocratie eut les fureurs de la crapule, et le bonnet de coton ne se montra pas moins hideux que le bonnet rouge. La raison publique était troublée comme après les grands bouleversements de la nature. Des gens d'esprit en restèrent idiots pour toute leur vie."

So Fred gets dragged along to an établissement that nowadays has been supplanted by swiping right on Tinder. Given his pick of bizarrely dressed females, he gets a sense of the weird, the liminal: "Frédéric, en regardant ces personnes, éprouvait un sentiment d'abandon, un malaise. Il songeait encore à Mme Arnoux et il lui semblait participer à quelque chose d'hostile se tramant contre elle."