“... Own but her essay on Montaigne, with its celebration of ‘the life within us’ that by no means accords with the person we present in public, and it is Montaigne who provides the epigraph to the book’s final chapter, counselling against ‘the condition of living by reference to others’. She is fond of Montaigne-like distinctions between ...”

“... since Garnett’s version (and five separate revisions of it), there have been translations by David Magarshack (1958), Andrew MacAndrew (1970), Julius Katzer (1980), Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (1990), David McDuff (1993), Ignat Avsey (1994) and, most recently, Michael Katz. Apparently there are at least ...”

“... not apply to higher-cost subjects such as science and engineering? ‘Market discipline’ surely means that if universities cannot find enough students to pay the fees for such subjects, then they should not be offering them. A similar query may be raised about the proposal to maintain some element of the central grant for ‘strategically important and ...”

“... a theoretical, but actually non-existent, one-bedroom flat. This is what the ‘bedroom tax’ means.‘It’s just very, very hard to deal with,’ Quinn told me when I visited her. ‘This is my home, this isn’t just a council place where I live. They can only do it to me because I have nothing. I’m sure if they had their way they would kill us. I ...”

“... the survivors with machine-gun fire. More than two hundred were killed. The prime minister, David Ben Gurion, instructed Yigal Allon, the operation’s leader, to deport the surviving residents. Another commander, Yitzhak Rabin, issued the order: ‘The inhabitants of Lydda must be expelled quickly, without regard to age.’ These and other episodes of ...”

“... to pose, the enraged Freud painted over her face and inserted that of his long-time assistant David Dawson. But the baby had not caused offence, so was not painted out, with the result that a naked and strangely breasted Dawson is now seen feeding the child. Freud’s American dealer assumed the picture would be unsellable; it was bought by the first ...”

“... only Pinter continues radical and untainted by the Establishment. I’m not sure if this means that in Eagleton’s view I don’t qualify because of my absence of eminence or because such protests as I take part in are too sporadic and low-profile to be noticed. Either way if I had email I could send him or the Guardian a one-word ...”

“... chimerical. Yet Bate is struck by the fact that Shakespeare seems genuinely able to use Ovid as a means of transcending his immediate historical situation. Ovid’s Actaeon, who gazed on the naked beauty of Diana and was torn to pieces by his dogs, was used by both Jonson and his commentator Sandys for a political purpose; Shakespeare in The Merry Wives of ...”

“... the Inspectorate reported in 1995; and again in 1997: ‘the control of train movements by means of a signalling system is absolutely fundamental to the safe running of a railway.’ Yet I can find no evidence that any analysis was done to measure the cost of installing electronic signalling as against the benefit in lives saved. Had it been done, I ...”

“... small fry off with razor grins; nothing ain’t change but color and attire ... Walcott evidently means to identify himself with Spoiler. Classically educated and widely travelled, he can’t share in the brave new optimism of Independence and Black Power. He sees the old inequalities persisting – ‘black still poor, though black is beautiful’ – and ...”

“... down the suggestion of independence and external appraisal in the word ‘adequate’, so that it means something like ‘accepted’ or ‘operative’. This would give us a theory of morality akin to H.L.A. Hart’s theory of law, set out in The Concept of Law, according to which establishing the existence of a legal obligation on a certain person to do ...”

“... Chess Championship final between Magnus Carlsen and Ian Nepomniachtchi. All this knock-on sport means there’s a big overlap with the huge sporting events that were always meant to be happening in 2021, such as the British and Irish Lions tour of South Africa, which is the biggest event in rugby outside the quadrennial World Cup, and the T20 World Cup, the ...”

“... adopted it in a decorous shape for his longest and most ambitious work, The Moralists. David Hume, whom Diderot befriended in Paris in the 1760s, used it to scandalously sceptical effect in his Dialogues concerning Natural Religion, unpublishable until after his death. Diderot’s most famous work is a dialogue: Rameau’s Nephew, in which a ...”

“... v. Leviathan’, to borrow Orwell’s own terms, are inclined to hit this over-dramatic, David and Goliath note, including the mandatory weapons-upgrade from slingshot to ‘battered typewriter’ (it wouldn’t do for the typewriter to be newish and in quite good nick). Orwell does seem to have been a brave man when put to the test, but to speak of ...”

“... Libya and Morocco. Mubarak’s repression merely delayed it. A cool reckoning of what this means, against the backdrop of the wider region, is in order. A year before the 11 September attacks, Gilles Kepel, in his widely cited book Jihad, argued that the resort by jihadi groups to spectacular acts of violence against the ‘far enemy’ in the West ...”