“... father’s own failure to win a Cambridge fellowship in 1877 – Jane Emery suggests that Macaulay may have been anxious not to outstrip her beloved father academically. There is certainly an air of defeatism in Macaulay’s person as well as in her work, about which she was consistently self-deprecating: ‘I have no wish to be a great writer. My touch is for ...”

“... study of the past tense is ‘the only case I know in which two great systems of Western thought may be tested and compared . . . like ordinary scientific hypotheses’. As for his own theory of the tense, it is ‘an opening statement in the latest round of a debate on how the mind works that has raged for centuries’ – this book never runs low on ...”

“... to adultery. Since we are not told much about Othello and Desdemona’s sex-life, the connection may seem gratuitous. Greenblatt linked the two by interpreting a phrase of Iago’s, when he is describing his plot to entrap Othello, to mean that he will appeal to a guilt in Othello about the excess of his erotic feelings for his wife: ‘that he is too ...”

“... by outnumbering them. All the same, even if a way of life based exclusively upon the potato may be richer than Sir Charles Trevelyan suggests, when the root fails, all is lost. It is estimated that up to a million people died, either from starvation or from disease that came in the Famine’s wake. Emigration, to the United Status and also to ...”

“... with a quarrel that occurred when the war had been going on for years. To begin at the beginning may be thought a sensible and natural way of proceeding – the Red King’s advice to Alice is still quoted with approval; and Nuttall actually calls such beginnings ‘natural’, as opposed to ‘interventionist’ or ‘formal’. Yet our culture encourages ...”

“... detail, by Marilyn Mosby, the state’s attorney for Baltimore City, at a press conference on 1 May. Toward the end of her 16-minute speech, Mosby, a 35-year-old African-American woman, did the unthinkable: she charged six police officers with crimes ranging from murder to involuntary manslaughter. She promised justice to Gray’s parents and pleaded for ...”

“... since 2003. The repetition and baby-talk have largely cleared up, while some studiedly casual David Foster Wallace-ish ‘so’s and ‘anyway’s have crept in. But there are still the perky pop-cultural asides (‘Amigos, I had my doubts’) along with the unidiomatic, vaguely Yiddishy noises, probably descended from Saul Bellow: ‘I was very ...”

“... might no longer want to be where he thought he was going. I don’t know whether Carruth regards David Lynch as an influence, but Lynch’s name kept coming into my mind as I tried to find a temporary shorthand for the effect of Upstream Colour. The characters are quiet, self-contained, even self-absorbed; they are consumed by a project they themselves do ...”

“... State Department before he called Putin. Obama charmed him during their first meeting, and now he may keep some bits of Obamacare – forget all those years he spent saying the president was born in Kenya. He demoted the leader of his transition team, Chris Christie, the New Jersey governor mired in his own scandal for allegedly having his aides pursue a ...”

“... the US), Hughes damns damn near everybody. He follows the uncompromising American dictum that you may attack whomever you like as long as you attack them for being unwilling to compromise. A New York Times reviewer called the book ‘post-modern rather than high Enlightenment’, a surprising but sound judgment if we understand ‘post-modern’ as describing ...”

“... Francine du Plessix Gray – ‘Francine Duplicitous Gray’, as Roth called her. Interviewing may not have been Miller’s forte but what was his forte? He made such a skimpy mess of the Notes on the Text for Volume Three of Roth’s Library of America edition that Roth went apoplectic in a barrage of faxes that must have had little lightning bolts ...”

“... woman their mother was. The two things people know about Antonia White are that she wrote Frost in May and that she was a disgraceful mother. Some doubtless know it the other way around. Mud sticks. And Chitty’s Now to My Mother: A Very Personal Memoir, rather than White’s very personal sequence of novels, is what appears to have stuck in the public mind ...”

“... friendship, sex and knowledge. If some lotus-eating visionaries are to be believed, computers may even have a spiritual dimension: as they grow ever more powerful, they have the potential to become our ‘mind children’. At some point – the ‘singularity’ – in the not-so-distant future, we humans will merge with these silicon creatures, thereby ...”

“... even if (as I suggested a few weeks ago) there was not then the degree of national consensus which David Marquand, in The Unprincipled Society, would have us believe, there was at any rate full employment, or as near to it as a liberal-democratic capitalist society is ever going to get. But just as, in the Thirties, the failure of the previous Labour ...”

“... in which Uriah Heep – ‘looking flabby and lead-coloured in the moonlight’ – explains to David Copperfield the experiences that showed him the value of being ’umble. ‘Dickens was a great connoisseur of hypocrisy,’ she writes, ‘yet he was not obsessive about it ... Why has his sense of humanity been so rare? Why are people so overwhelmed by ...”