“... in the middle of a field.20 January. Collected by the New Yorker and taken to be photographed by Richard Avedon, now a grey-haired faun of 72 who says he’s bored with taking snapshots in the studio (this morning Isaiah Berlin and Stephen Spender) and wants to photograph me outside. ‘Outside’ means that eventually I find myself perched up a tree in Hyde ...”

“... interesting about them. Mr Clark rather disproportionately brings Yeats in at this point. Yeats may have concerned himself with the sacred mysteries, but they were not where he saw and heard poetry. He saw and heard poetry in real life. Mr Clark concedes that Yeats developed towards a pregnant natural speech as Brennan did not, but he could have conceded ...”

“... context or to understand the sequence of events that led up to it. Even though the American people may not know what has been done in their name, those on the receiving end certainly do: they include the people of Iran (1953), Guatemala (1954), Cuba (1959 to the present), Congo (1960), Brazil (1964), Indonesia (1965), Vietnam (1961-73), Laos ...”

“... the assistance of the occupation, for which Bush and Blair wanted backdated cover from the UN. In May, at Annan’s urging, the Security Council ratified the Anglo-American seizure of Iraq, voting unanimously for Resolution 1483, which endorsed Bremer’s Coalition Provisional Authority, and pledged the UN to play a ‘vital role’, as requested by the White ...”

“... critical works like this ‘will ever make much contribution to the common wisdom’. ‘We may have here an avant-garde that will never be joined by the main army – happy enough behind the lines and content with its familiar rations.’ Kermode is writing these words in 1980, and reflecting not only on Tanner but more generally on the ‘new ...”

“... over my body too. The immobile is in a fixed, restful state, whereas ‘motion, however swift it may seem, tends essentially towards immobility, and thus, however slowly it may sometimes appear to do so, continually conducts bodies towards death.’ The Bathroom may sound offputtingly ...”

“... is that it is definitely “middle-class”. But all schools here are that.’ Beatrice Webb, who may have had some interest in defining the area in which humility was appropriate, complained that her ‘absence of humility ... narrowed her influence to those whom she happened to like and who happened to like her’. She had a point: there was something of ...”

“... that a combination of factors, including genetic predisposition, is involved, and that onset may be triggered by a virus. Like lupus and myasthenia gravis, two potentially fatal conditions, MS affects more women than men – the MS Society puts the ratio at 3-2. Susceptibility is thought to be partly related to climate: its incidence is much higher in ...”

“... A job application posted through the unusual medium of a scholarly journal? I doubt it, but it may be that this essay found its way onto a desk at Penguin Books, leading to Cannadine’s appointment, in 1988, as general editor of the new Penguin History of Britain. Eight years on – two years longer than it took to commission and publish the entire series ...”

“... and self-discipline, and a deep hatred of the United States and the Western way of life. As Richard Hofstader and others have argued, for more than two hundred years this kind of combination has always acted as a prompt for paranoid and reactionary conspiracy theories, most of them groundless. Now the threat is real; and for the foreseeable future we ...”

“... multimedia work provocative enough to entice the public back to contemporary art galleries they may have visited many times already.Richter somehow manages to do both. On the one hand, he uses an oversized squeegee to make huge colourful abstracts that can sell for £20 million each; on the other, he is the creator of austere constructions in ...”

“... liberation. While such a direct equation between literary hermeneutics and political repression may be dubious, it cannot be denied that it yields some interesting insights. Terence Hawkes, Christopher Norris and Jacqueline Rose show how the attempts of some influential Shakespeare critics to reduce the plays to coherent unified structures break down as the ...”

“... great mystery’ of the president’s ‘power over the very continuance of the world’ may seem excessive, but he’s channelling, so he claims, Dick Cheney, who appears to believe that the president, by virtue of his control of the nuclear bomb, is freed from all constitutional – and even ordinary ethical – restraints. The meaning of ...”

“... not just in it?’ Nagel says he’s ‘using the term “religious temperament” in a way that may seem illegitimate to those who are genuinely religious’, but it won’t seem illegitimate to those engaged in what Johnston calls the ‘truly religious … life’, only to most of those who are ordinarily thought of as religious, those who are counted as ...”

“... discovery was made by natives, to which fact the unfortunately mutilated condition of the papyrus may be ascribed. Most of the fractures are recent.’ The Egyptologist Sir Wallis Budge, writing in 1920, remembered that he bought the papyrus ‘at a preposterous price’ from an Egyptian dealer, who said it had been found in a ransacked tomb between the feet ...”