“... Conservative precepts. The private sector knows, and grows, best. The City is untouchable: it may be chastised, but never seriously confronted. Unemployment is a form of dependency, best dealt with through market discipline. Competition is the law of all social and economic life, and it is the role of the state to encourage it and to secure public ...”

“... public that watching porn is something lots of adults like to do. (It’s hard to imagine Theresa May gearing up to speak on the matter. Or Philip Hammond. Boris Johnson perhaps, but he’s off the pitch.) And yet the craftier Tories, if any still exist, may see this as an advantage: the party can adopt its ...”

“... actions and reactions is insistently framed by the word, the ideals it evokes, the way it may be mocked or exploited, and the question of whether virtue resides in character or is only realised through what someone does or doesn’t do.This moral uncertainty extends into Virgil’s handling of some of the foundational tales of Roman history. When ...”

“... In May​ 2014, the bodies of two teenage girls were found hanging from the branches of an old mango tree in the Badaun district of Uttar Pradesh. The nooses had been fashioned from their own dupattas. Relatives and neighbours from nearby villages came to the orchard in solidarity and mourning. The police arrived, but the families refused to let them cut the bodies down ...”

“... another can be the crux of litigation on which billions are at stake. For this reason, inflation may be the UK’s most controversial national statistic. It’s certainly the most consequential. It moves markets and it determines monetary policy: it moves markets because it determines monetary policy. But none of that is a price collector’s immediate ...”

“... future betrayal softens his fury at die Boere. When he gets to Pretoria he can hardly bear it: May this earth be blighted! May locusts devour their jacaranda trees! May Loftus Versfeld Stadium be used for political rallies by the ANC! May the State ...”

“... it can achieve some of its major economic objectives in the process. But the long-term outcome may very well be something that the Government does not anticipate, though I suspect it would not be unduly concerned if it did: a collapse in the maintenance of consent among the governed. If you start from the relatively uncontentious proposition that a ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... to death. The 415 pages of this anthology won’t kill you – nor will you go blind – but you may from time to time feel queasy. An anthology of sex is something of a bathhouse, back-alley enterprise. Here are passages without antecedent or consequence, brief, sometimes anonymous; sometimes gratifying enough, in a casual sort of way. Writing about sex is ...”

“... is a chilling absurdity’. This chilling absurdity is followed by more of the same. It may be unreasonable to expect books about heroic authors to be heroic, or books about deeply funny authors to be deeply funny, but if any heroics or any jokes occur they should at least be intended. Allowing for a slightly surprising tendency on the part of Amis ...”

“... world is instead part of a vast game played by no fixed rules. The continuity between our cultures may thus hinder a proper appreciation of Greek science. The solution, Lloyd proposes, is for the history of Greek science to be carried out only in the context of careful comparison with other societies’ science: not in order to show how one is superior but to ...”

“... be read in tandem with a lecture series spread over a university term or semester. Yet while there may have been perfectly good pragmatic (as well as commercial) motives for writing a new book on 19th-century art, the main reason put forward by Eisenman et al is the need for a critical (as opposed to empiricist/affirmative) survey of the period. That salient ...”

“... Say ‘Iain Banks’ and the person you are talking to will say ‘The Wasp Factory.’ Banks may have as much trouble getting out from under the success of his first novel as did William Golding. It was a memorable debut. The Wasp Factory provoked a moral panic in 1984. The TLS critic called it the ‘literary equivalent of the nastiest kind of juvenile delinquency’; Margaret Forster thought it less a novel than the script for a video nasty ...”

“... and to risk missing both. Historians of science, who will be impressed by the annotation, may wonder why the text presents only a partial history of the subject. Other readers, welcoming the text as an entertaining and erudite essay on a topic of mesmeric appeal, may wonder why they are obliged to purchase a pound ...”