“... of France died, leaving three sons. But none of them reigned for more than a few years, each dying young. His daughter Isabella, however, married Edward II of England, and they had a son who became Edward III. That was Edward’s claim to the throne of France, by right: Dieu et mon droit, as the royal motto still declares. But it was the son of Philip’s ...”

“... embody ‘MAGA: The Next Generation’. JD Vance, formerly known as James Donald Bowman, James David Hamel and J.D. Vance, now strangely rebranded without the stops, is a self-styled ‘hillbilly’ whose backwoods was Middletown, Ohio, an industrial suburb of Cincinnati (pop. 50,987), where he went from poverty to Yale Law School. He wrote a bestselling ...”

“... after a glucose injection ...’   ... extracts of testes prostate and seminal vesicles of young bulls ... [were] indicated for all types and consequences of genital hypoplasia (the excessive smallness of an organ) ... But according to Professor Schenk [who testified ‘recently’: some of these people are still with us], ‘no specific effect was ...”

“... or ‘feline’. And while the animal is a symbol for simplicity when young and a synonym for simple-mindedness when old, it nevertheless shows signs of psychological disturbance when fleeced. As with all specialists, it is clear that Ryder is drawn magnetically to everything appertaining to sheep. This is manifest in the 27 pages ...”

“... that he was able enough to make his own way in politics without the burden of a huge inheritance. Young Jonathan did not go along with this avuncular assessment. Political power, he agreed, was worth striving for. Media acclaim was seductive. But by far the most pressing priority in life was to become seriously rich. He wanted to be an MP. He wanted to be a ...”

“... entirely consistent with the New Liberalism of the years when Tawney, Beveridge and Attlee were young. The underlying conviction was that the small cost in individual liberty was outweighed by the larger gain in collective equality – a gain without which, indeed, individual liberty was virtually meaningless to those of the population to whom the ...”

“... stories in this book recognise it in one way or another. Most, like the examples by Helen Garner, David Brooks, Peter Carey, Joan London, Kate Grenville, are admirably achieved on this basis, the authors all born in the Forties or Fifties; and the names indicate that the newer European immigrants have not yet found a voice in their new language. Particularly ...”

“... what its title suggests, depicting a brief, intense and bitter affair between a scientist and a young woman in Prague. It is a tightly-constructed and sharply realised work which, like Greene’s The End of the Affair, charts the course of an ultimately destructive relationship, more of an ordeal than an affair, and tries to make some sense of the ...”

“... Fish. Fish’s salaries and lecture fees have been part of the lore of academic culture since David Lodge’s Changing Places (1975), where he appeared thinly disguised as Morris Zapp, who, ‘enviably offered his first job by Euphoria State, had stuck out for twice the going salary, and got it’; and who had ‘the professional killer instinct’ in a ...”

“... legal education in Britain today. We are told that from their ‘first days at law school’ our young lawyers are taught that civil liberties in this country are ‘protected by the common law’ and that ‘their violation has been the fault of Parliament’. The hero of the story, law students learn, is an ‘independent judiciary’, standing steadfastly ...”

“... which set the vanished child above reproach. Cry as you will, take what you need, the night is young and limitless our greed. Where does Prynne come from? The question is not one of origin or influence but of approach. It is important to insist – in advance of the predictable accusations of élitism, difficulty and so on – that there are many ...”

“... bound to be unimpressed by mysteries vouchsafed in the very belly of the beast. In any case, the young Eagleton already knew a great deal about access to holy places. As a ten-year-old altar boy in a Carmelite convent, he had held the position of ‘gatekeeper’, so that whenever a novice took the veil and vanished behind the walls for good, it was the hand ...”

“... were: ‘Everyone drives cars nowadays.’ He drowned himself in a millpond where, when he was young, a friend had gone under. He had often warned me of the dangers of Bourne millrun: its treacherous currents and strangling weeds. Not throwing himself under the wheels of the ubiquitous car was, presumably, a criticism of the way things had turned out.He ...”

“... who wrote nothing, was prosecuted for impiety, or when Spinoza was excommunicated, or when David Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature ‘fell dead-born from the press’. Kitcher’s ‘growing conviction that contemporary Anglophone philosophy has lost its audience’ suggests that he is thinking instead of the recent past. ‘Indeed, as I look back to ...”

“... Divorcing was reissued by New York Review Books in 2020 with an introduction by Sontag’s son, David Rieff. Lament for Julia is now available for the first time, along with nine of her short stories. Taubes’s fiction is autobiographical. She writes female protagonists who are daughters of psychoanalysts or trapped in fluorescently unhappy marriages or ...”