“... a ceasefire and unnerving those who have come to realise that the relative calm they are enjoying may hang on the word of someone they fear and despise – and have often underestimated. These events came too late for inclusion in Patrick Cockburn’s book, but they follow the pattern he skilfully sets out in this complex account of the emergence of Muqtada ...”

“... but there are clear signs that its leaders are worried about climbing on the Taliban tiger. They may be rigidly puritanical in their ideology, but they are the kind of rigid puritans who in British and American politics have often proved remarkably flexible when it comes down to accepting government jobs and forming alliances. Munawar Hassan, the Jamaat’s ...”

“... with folk or even fairy tale in ways that are not easy to sort out. Peele’s questing knight may primarily evoke the world of romance, but that is not his only habitat. Jack, and the maidens at the well, certainly suggest folk tale but without being confined to it. Delia, Venelia, the were-bear and the magician Sacrapant who persecutes them could be ...”

“... Heidegger to D.H. Lawrence continued to look on science as the death of the spirit. F.R. Leavis may have inveighed against what he called the ‘technologico-Bethamite spirit’, but his Cambridge colleague I.A. Richards drew on psychology and neurology for his theory of poetry. Poetry became a kind of mental hygiene or spiritual therapy, in contrast to the ...”

“... fiction are often begged to provide the histories of their lives and adventures, so too they may be talked out of their possessions. ‘You do wisely … when in a Crowd, to amuse the Mob by Quarrels,’ Henry Fielding’s master-criminal Jonathan Wild advises his gang, ‘that while they are listening to your Jargon, you ...”

“... The boat ramming is as likely, they think, to be socialising and play as anything else. The orcas may simply have found a fun new pastime, and might just get bored of it one day, like the salmon hats or porpoise bullying. The really remarkable thing about the boat-ramming is that it is happening at all. Not because ambiguous or even apparently aggressive ...”

“... has hardened. Starmer vies with Macron for the accolade of least popular European leader. It may be cold comfort in Number Ten, but Starmer is only repeating the pattern established by Britain’s post-Brexit leaders. Each takes office lauded by the press as offering a new vision for British politics – May’s sketch ...”

“... about their occupation, explain: Moi, je suis une espèce de roi. Within such a family, a spinster may be pitied (for ‘tragedy’ read ‘unmarried’): she may also occupy a privileged position as a licensed eccentric. Ursula Wyndham is not outrageous, but she is – what often appears to be the same thing – practical ...”

“... But the end of regular work destroys social life for many; well-tuned skills go out of date and may themselves prevent the acquisition of more modern ones; inflation is another marginalising force. It is easier to remember what a bus fare or a cup of tea cost in 1940 than to have the money ready for use today. Laslett’s vision of the enormous opportunity ...”

“... informs us that Eiffel himself had some misfortunes designing locks for the Panama Canal, which may have sown a seed in the novelist’s mind. Thomson records spending much time in Paris and London archives, boning up architectural history – an effort reflected in the novel’s density of specialised detail. The other area of research is fiction’s ...”

“... ago? Well, no, is Castle’s answer, and in a way she’s right. Lesbian-feminist theoreticians may have succeeded in making the lesbian into almost the representative woman, but it’s been at the cost of vanishing her, making her into a figure for absence of identity, and anti-essence. She has stood for the disembodied euphoria of a feminine gender always ...”

“... finish a novel, he persuaded himself, was to stay in bed all day and drink a lot of whisky, which may provide a clue to his dwindling output. Whether Hamilton ever successfully made love to a woman is a matter for scholarly debate. It would seem that women needed to have an ‘L’ in their first names for him to find them attractive, but even then there was ...”

“... do not line up neatly in support of one another, women must choose, and their struggles to do so may serve as a catalyst for self-definition, resistance and writing.’ Queen Anne is the most prominent example of a woman whose mixed loyalties resulted in ‘self-definition’. Her husband was reluctant to acknowledge her autonomous royal status as the ...”

“... John Bayley’s new novel is largely about those who are had on, or taken in, and this may well include his readers, who need to keep their wits about them. To begin with, he conjures up a couple of innocents. There was an innocent, too, as hero in his last novel, In Another Country, published in 1955. But Oliver, a young officer with the British army of occupation, was a worrier and a sensitive, risking trouble for the sake of his German girlfriend, and contrasted with his hideously successful rival ...”

“... Equality can be seen as an indirect attempt to reaffirm its relevance. On the surface its concerns may seem to be different: to establish which parts of Marxism are still defensible and which are not, and to scrutinise the idea of self-ownership that has played a central role in recent libertarian thought, especially in North America. To these tasks Cohen ...”