“... whose numbers have been swelling in North Rhine-Westphalia. The New Year’s Eve assaults on more than five hundred women – 31 men have so far been charged, including 18 refugees – have given Cologne a new symbolism. The German far right has got what it wanted: its own version of the Charlie Hebdo and Bataclan attacks, and a ...”

“... London for grill-outs in the wide open spaces of Texas, and criticism began to focus on things more deserving of opprobium than eating too much asparagus or thinking mushy peas were guacamole – waging an illegal war, for example. Whoever the target is, however, the implications of the charge are the same: behind their shutters, in their comfortable ...”

“... will see that the creator of the site is a unicycling enthusiast – committed to minimalism in more ways than one.By some extraordinary coincidence (oh all right, the odds are so tiny it’s clearly no coincidence at all) tinyurl.com/dick takes you to the homepage of Vice-President Dick Cheney, part of www.whitehouse. gov. In a different universe, it ...”

“... definitively with one view or another, though he expresses healthy doubts about some of the more ‘fabulous stories of the poets’ – that Prometheus moulded the first people out of clay, for example – and the ‘no less incredible’ theories of some philosophers, such as Empedocles’ idea that ‘in the beginning individual members were produced ...”

“... had contributed to the formation of this austere doctrine, and though quite often subjected to more severe scrutiny than literary journalism normally attracts, the early essay ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ remained influential, and suited the New Criticism well. As Gordon suggests, we have moved on from there, not just because we like gossip ...”

“... yourself. Then we began to go through the details of the death certificate. Name: Hugh Swynnerton Thomas. Date of death: 7 May 2017. Your relation to him? Son. A few years ago, when I asked my father why he wasn’t going to the house in south-west France where he had for several summers spent a few weeks, his answer sounded straightforward. ‘Too far from ...”

“... Amendment.’ Contemporary uses of the term seemed equally unclear to him, amounting to little more than slogans to whip up publicity for the speaker or denounce his or her enemies. As the leading First Amendment scholar Frederick Schauer noted in 1992, ‘there seems to be little free inquiry about free inquiry and little free speech about free ...”

“... The publishers say that The Poetry of Edward Thomas is the first full-length study to deal exclusively with Thomas’s poetry (in Britain, they must mean). On the face of it, a six-decade gap of this sort shows a strange failure in critical husbandry. Yet it is not really so surprising ...”

“... The story of Doubting Thomas, examined at length in this learned and fascinating book, has its origin in a brief passage near the end of St John’s Gospel. After the crucifixion, when the disciples were assembled behind locked doors ‘for fear of the Jews’, Jesus appeared among them and displayed the wounds in his hands and side ...”

“... India who adopted the practice. Having your menagerie painted was also expensive: Martin imported more than 17,000 sheets of fine watercolour paper. Indian artists worked in traditional stone-based pigments and used Mughal techniques, but took European natural history images as their models. Shaikh Zain ud-Din, one of the earliest and best practitioners of ...”

“... the English Revolution which has dominated historical thinking ever since. In 1952, he published More’s Utopia: The Biography of an Idea, a competent but not epoch-making work. Since then he has published no single full-length work of historical research. The editor of the volume under review says that ‘for over thirty years … he has served as the ...”

“... R.S. Thomas’s four autobiographies (four memoiressays, really) were written in Welsh, and the most substantial of the four – first published in Wales a dozen years ago – was titled Neb, which means ‘nobody’: as in ‘a nobody’ or ‘nobody very special’. And this fits with our uncertain view of Thomas these past four decades ...”

“... somewhat by the singer’s sense of his own life lacking much direction or purpose; and it’s more than aware that dying young isn’t on its own enough of an achievement to turn someone into James Dean. ‘Too Late to Die Young’ points up, too, the contradictions of being both a star and a human being, in terms not only of what consitutes the good ...”

“... teachers found him ‘quite satisfactory’, but thought he ‘would be better still if he brought more enthusiasm to his work’. He’s quoted in Crap Towns: ‘I wish I could think of just one nice thing I could tell you about Hull, oh yes . . . It’s very nice and flat for cycling.’ Crap Towns lists famous residents, but not famous disparagers. Spike ...”

“... how disproportionate it was, and right, too, that being white is one of the factors that make it more likely your murder will be news (others include being young, female, photogenic and having a name that’s short enough to fit across the front page of a tabloid newspaper). More recently, Blair’s been unfairly attacked ...”