“... that his great object had been to get electricity from a magnet. Visitors to Exhibition Road may also experience some incredulity, for the first caption they come to is dominated by that text from Romans 1.20 which suggests that those who fail to discern the finger of God in creation are without excuse: ‘For the invisible things of Him, from the ...”

“... Sherston to himself. He now accepts that it is not necessary to approve of tactics which he may simply not understand, and after a brief spell in the pavilion – ‘retired hurt’ – he plays on until the match is over, wicket intact. For all the possible irony of its title, Sherston’s Progress finally endorses Pilgrim’s journey towards the ...”

“... a hundred years after the introduction of limited liability, by the Nobel Prize-winning economist Robert Merton, who showed that the equity of a limited liability company could be valued as if it were a financial option – that is, an instrument which offers rights over the future fruits of the company’s assets. This option has value – in the jargon, it ...”

“... author (or his female narrator) could imagine. The answer – sovereignty over their husbands – may disappoint; we would prefer if she had said ‘over themselves’. But that concept had yet to come. Chaucer took more risks with his representation of Criseyde. Troilus, her suitor, is a courtly lover so passive that he now reads like a caricature (a ...”

“... led by Jean-Luc Mélenchon, lost its initial momentum. In the run-up to the European elections in May, opinion polls showed that the French would vote on the basis of national issues, which persuaded Macron to repeat the two gambles he had taken in 2017: that the only serious challenger would be Le Pen, and that by dramatising the choice between his own list ...”

“... off the social underworld and exposing its squalor, was somehow inherently subversive. Behind this may lie the assumption that people in the overworld are as conservative as they are only because they don’t know about the sordid lives which others are forced to lead, which is far too charitable a view of them. Isn’t it bad enough that everyday existence is ...”

“... of grave rituals all signal belief of some kind, but the beliefs of the prehistoric millennia may have been as different from one another as any one of them was from the later documented religions; and the changes from one practice to another, like the change from long barrows to stone circles, or the later and sudden abandonment of henges, even the ...”

“... you were born. If you don’t remain there, but retain some of your native accent, your identity may be partially defined by ambiguous relations to places, class positions and the sounds of your own voices. Many people’s speech is unstable in just this way, and when poets are congratulated by reviewers for having ‘found a voice’, I wonder whether their ...”

“... from resourceful young bushytail to mangy endgame quarry’. But however much future historians may discover which is unknown to the commentators of the present day, and however right or wrong Blair may be in believing that they will be kind to him, it is unlikely that either his committed admirers or his committed ...”

“... flat as possible. American higher education allows much freedom of choice, and English students may practically major in Ulysses, but Teacher has the duty of keeping it from doing them harm. No weaker hypothesis, I submit, can explain the glee with which Kenner reports a total agreement of modern experts that Molly has been pure during the ten years without ...”

“... could not be heard and putting his hand over her mouth. Fox News calls her a ‘loon’ (‘She may very well believe everything she’s saying. That is one of the signs of lunacy, believing something that isn’t real’); Senator Orrin Hatch says she is clearly ‘mixed up’; Donald Trump Jr tweets a crude drawing making fun of her; if the assault ‘was ...”

“... media, you would be my concubines.’ One of the weirdest lines of the 2024 US election came from Robert J. O’Neill, a pro-Trump former Navy SEAL who claims to have been one of those who shot Osama bin Laden. Respondents to O’Neill’s post on X, which was directed at a gaggle of young, male campaigners, wondered whether it was a lexical flub. But ...”

“... were dreaming of becoming a global power. This step was not as obvious or inevitable as it may now appear. Americans before the Second World War spoke less of the country’s exceptional primacy than of its exceptional aloofness from European-style power politics. They prided themselves on being above espionage, diplomatic intrigue and standing ...”

“... all other Kings, have ever been subject unto them, not only ever since my birth, but even as I may justly say, before my birth, and while I was yet in my Mother’s belly.’ It is no wonder that this clever boy grew up to be watchful, or that he thanked God for his miraculous deliverances and chose to shore up monarchy, or that he learned to dissemble and ...”

“... sorts of American writers: the young Allen Ginsberg paid him homage and copied his style, while Robert Lowell, for example, looked to Williams for a freer, more democratic manner than his rivals could offer. Though he remains an acquired taste in Britain, Williams’s position in American poetry, at least, seems assured. That position rests, above all ...”