“... the fact that von Däniken is crying about their criticisms all the way to the bank. Even so, one may wonder whether the word ‘dangerous’ is really appropriate! Professor Daniel earlier, and much more justifiably, applies it to the archaeological dimension which Chamberlain and Kossinna gave to the idea of the German master-race. It is curious that ...”

“... of Shakespeare? Either as a substitute for or as a supplement to a reading of his work. I may read about Byron or Orton because the life itself is both well-documented and well worth watching; but Shakespeare’s life is neither. How he behaved, what he endured, who he knew, where he went – such information does not expand or deepen my grasp of ...”

“... This is a political claim which many people will reject from the outset, and those dissenters may use the violence of the last twenty years as evidence that none of the available meta-narratives – nationalism, anti-nationalism, imperialism, unionism, socialism, feminism – are sufficiently hospitable to differences. There is a series of questions to be ...”

“... be an absorbing and solitary game. Not so, one feels, for Christina Rossetti, whose love poems may equally be sphinxes without any real secret, and yet with no hint of fantasy or teasing. They are always grave and unselfconscious, impersonal, calm both with sorrow and with belief. Those heavy-lidded Italian eyes look always a little weary, like the Mona ...”

“... in the scene.’ Of Nimoy’s autobiography, though every bit as triumphalist as Nichols’s, one may say that there is a kind of failure built into it, for twenty years ago Nimoy produced a book called I Am Not Spock: now he knows on which side his bread is buttered. As with Nichols, however, the fictional character seems to have swallowed up the real ...”

“... khakis are uniform. (‘Everything he now wore smelled rainily of the iron.’) Lutz’s narrators may be descendants of Bartleby the Scrivener, though incapable of his transcendent ‘I prefer not to.’The sterile vocabulary of offices is subtly deployed to show how deeply it structures our perceptions: ‘I have probably got her features collated all wrong ...”

“... On 21 May​Israel and Hamas agreed to a ceasefire after eleven days of fighting, but the days of ‘quiet’ – as the New York Times tellingly describes the last seven years, in which Israel intensified its domination over the Palestinians with impunity – are over. Dead, too, is Trump’s plan to bypass the Palestinian question through ‘normalisation’ between Israel and Arab autocrats keen to do business with the Jewish state (and to buy its surveillance technology to monitor their own dissidents ...”

“... part of this enterprise, and in Williams’s hands it becomes a subtle appreciation of ideas that may be fundamentally unlike anything we could think now, but that also help us to understand our own ideas better. Two of his best books were on historical subjects: Descartes: The Project of Pure Inquiry (1978) and Shame and Necessity (1993), a profound study of ...”

“... you. (D&D’s revival piggybacked on the film-based Tolkien revival too, though the Tolkien estate may not have loved it: the first D&D sets had characters called hobbits, but the makers changed the name to ‘halflings’ after a trademark challenge.) The first role-playing games (RPGs) and the first popular video games appeared at nearly the same ...”

“... sexual and her emotional life. Biogenetic manipulation opens up much more radical perspectives. It may retroactively change our understanding of ourselves as ‘natural’ beings, in the sense that we will experience our ‘natural’ dispositions as mediated, not as given – as things which can in principle be manipulated and therefore as merely ...”

“... contact with a mind-independent world. These (and other) familiar objections to inferentialism may have merit, but we can ignore them for present purposes since Bermúdez’s book looks kindly on the language of thought version of the inferentialist tradition. At least, the first half does. One more preliminary: I’ve been speaking rather freely about ...”

“... it lopped, but will feel about it as I have seen others feel about having a tomcat neutered. We may trim trees, butcher them even, but we cherish them too. British species, native and exotic, include those appropriate to the scale of narrow streets – rowan, birch, cherry and hawthorn are more recent additions to ours – and a whole range of others, some ...”

“... alerts us to what goes on in Williams, it also alerts us to what goes on in Koch. Koch’s poetry may come addressed to others, but it likes to please itself. This is as true of the seemingly impenetrable poems that he wrote at the start of his career as it is of his most lucid comic turns. But while he can write a poetry so delighted that the exclamation ...”

“... poem freely. In the end, the translator’s mode matters less than his or her poetic powers, which may manifest themselves in an empathy with Dante’s style and emotions, and in the handling of rhythm, forms of sonority and verbal intensity. As a medieval Catholic writer, Dante was foreign to post-Reformation English taste, not only in England but in the ...”

“... as anybody else would have done, into a pattern of denial or a strategy for revenge. My mind may reason that the tenseness only registers neutrality, but my heart knows no true neutrality was ever so full of passion. One day along the path he brushed my breast in passing, and I thought, Does this efflorescence offend him? And I went into the redwoods ...”