“... into prayer rooms, throwing around Qurans, and never apologising for the damage or intrusion. It may be significant that, according to a recent survey, in the 2015 regional elections 51 per cent of the police and the military voted for the National Front. No need, then, to mobilise conspiracy theories to link ideology and practices. The selective application ...”

“... can change very quickly, people not so fast; some are liable to find themselves left behind, which may in fact prove the best and truest place to be.This language is not new. It is very old. Here is Joseph Chamberlain, defector and founder of the Liberal Unionist Party, in 1889: ‘We are Liberals and unchanged, even though our leader has deserted us.’ And ...”

“... The publishers describe this book as ‘lean’, which may be taken to refer to its style, though it also serves as a euphemism for ‘very short, especially considering the price’. Its immediate predecessor was Underworld, about seven times as long (or as fat). That book, as nearly everybody must know, begins with a chapter about a famous baseball game and a boy who retrieves the ball with which the decisive home run was scored ...”

“... something) one is protecting someone (or something) else. And that someone or something else may be – in fact is likely to be – of real value. When E.M. Forster said that he hoped he would have the courage to betray his country rather than his friend he was drawing our attention to the question of value, of what betrayal can protect. So we have to ...”

“... is everywhere. It’s more difficult to place Eggers as a writer. However well received his work may be – and reviews have generally been kind – his writing often feels like a side project among many other highly successful side projects. His books fall into the cracks between genres; they’re brought out in different editions by different ...”

“... applied). After reading Barbara Freese’s book, you get the feeling that vigorous punishments may again be inflicted on coal-burners, for their impact on both human and planetary health is becoming dire. Freese is the assistant attorney general for the state of Minnesota, and spent 12 years prosecuting companies for the damage they do to public ...”

“... to a dispute agreeing that it is to be privately determined by some other code of law, which may be a religious one. A good many religious organisations and sects require this of their members, and a good many more permit or encourage it. This is not to say that private arbitration within religious communities is without problems, as the archbishop might ...”

“... trigger Article 50 without parliamentary approval have been much discussed, but the EU referendum may well have another, more serious effect on the constitution. The UK’s membership of European organisations radically changed its constitution. For more than forty years domestic courts have interpreted Acts of Parliament in the light of EU ...”

“... When you consider the lethal attack on worshippers leaving the Finsbury Park Mosque last year, it may well be that it is Muslims who feel as threatened in Britain today as Jews did in the 1930s. (In Scotland, again for obvious reasons, it is Catholics or Protestants who are the targets of most recorded religiously motivated crime.) EU surveys unsurprisingly ...”

“... Spencer said. ‘Under bathrooms there was raw sewage seeping everywhere.’ The rat invasion may have been caused by work starting on construction sites for two new high-price private housing estates, with 750 and 450 houses apiece. Central government cuts to council budgets meant that Canterbury City Council allowed rubbish to accumulate, attracting ...”

“... approved of the Falklands War and one begins to see that for all her goodness and mild appeal she may have trod the same path as her contemporaries Amis and Larkin. Masked though she was in kindliness and general benevolence she may have ended up as far from her radical beginnings as they did, Dame Iris’s spiritual ...”

“... The Elephant Man (1980), a still from which appears on the cover of the book. David Lynch’s film may indeed demonstrate ‘time-worn points of view’ in some ways, and its central figure may indeed combine the stereotypes of the Sweet Innocent and the Saintly Sage (Norden is inordinately fond of categories like these and ...”

“... Pope, who was soon venting his pique against ‘piddling Tibbald’ in The Dunciad, published in May 1728, and elsewhere. In this context of rivalry, the appearance of Double Falsehood seemed suspiciously convenient. What better way for Theobald to demonstrate his editorial expertise than to produce out of his hat a supposed lost play by the master? And ...”

“... be obliged to impose familiar patterns on the material, working according to inherited ideas which may well have eluded critical inspection. Only thus can he discern some sort of coherence in works that seem strange largely because they appear to have none. Historians are professionally prejudiced in favour of order; they cannot simply record chaos; sequences ...”

“... prefer criticism to literature – who find theory more useful and also (which older people may find hard to believe) easier than the texts; the latter, rather than justifying the theory, are justified (if at all) by their tenuous and contingent relation to it. Allowing that E.K. Chambers’s original Oxford Book of 16th-Century Verse, frequently ...”