“... news. (Their first response was to get down on their knees; if praying does nothing for you, there may be safety, or at least reassurance, or the illusion of control, in numbers: I’ve been glued to the list of earthquakes on the website and Twitter feed of the National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology, @INGVterremoti.) A video of nuns running to ...”

“... to provide a safe service for patients. Empty shifts are covered either by agency workers, who may be unfamiliar with the hospital, or by doctors who feel pressured into working extra shifts (and in doing so break their contractual maximum of 72 hours a week). Too often shifts are left unfilled, even for extended periods such as maternity leave, making it ...”

“... power and that is why we cannot rest.’ ‘The free market,’ proclaimed the beleaguered Theresa May, ‘remains the greatest agent of collective human progress ever created. So let us win this argument for a new generation and defend free and open markets with all our might. Because there has rarely been a time when the choice of futures for Britain has ...”

“... Chilean political establishment. The discredit of the main political parties carried over into the May 2021 elections for the Constitutional Convention. The People’s List, a loose coalition of independents, finished third with 16 per cent of the vote, ahead of the main centre-left alliance and only narrowly behind the left-wing bloc formed by Gabriel ...”

“... But the end of regular work destroys social life for many; well-tuned skills go out of date and may themselves prevent the acquisition of more modern ones; inflation is another marginalising force.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 ...”

“... Cooper could not escape the paradox Hughes-Hallett so neatly exposes: that the myth of Cleopatra may offer women an image of power, but at the cost of implicating them in the misogynistic fantasies of patriarchy. For women, ‘Cleopatra’ is a trap. The real hero of the story of Cleopatra is, of course, the snake. Hughes-Hallett (in a rare lapse from her ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... longer period. Godley’s use of charts (see, for instance, the papers dated 11 January and 17 May 1991) will readily convey to the non-specialist reader in how spectacular a manner this performance was worse in almost every respect than in earlier periods: the growth rate exceptionally low, the rise in unemployment exceptionally rapid, the amplitude of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... exercised him over more than three decades. This said, the way in which he has chosen to do it may deter readers who are not, and have no wish to be, versed in backward-looking disputes between rival commentators over well-worn texts. Why, such readers may ask, does Professor Lockwood not go straight to his own answers ...”

“... weather is not clear, but no matter). Some of the information in the book, as the author admits, may be useful for settling bets in pubs. A chapter on weather lore contains all the old saws one could possibly want, and more. It is odd that, when the writers of old guidebooks so often talked about seaside airs being ‘elastic’, there was never a jingle on ...”

“... Mihalic (Croat) and Vasko Popa (Serb) are ‘Yugoslav’. This is excusable. And the Greeks, it may be thought, have looked out for themselves; also, less certainly, the Russians. But what have the Bulgars done wrong? And haven’t the Israelis looked after their own interests as efficiently as the Greeks after theirs? This is no way to start reviewing a ...”

“... essay’. As he became famous, he got above himself, became portentous. But although this may be true, the crucial change is simply in the quality of the writing. Murray the reviewer had dash and decisiveness, and also generosity. He wrote in the Sydney Morning Herald in 1975 a review of Auden’s Thank you, Fog which is also an obituary. After ...”

“... humanity. Greek language, etymology, rituals, the scattered fragments of the Dionysiac tradition, may all play their part in this project of recuperation. In fact, Young laments the ‘decline’ of Hellenic studies in this country – and, with that decline, the loss of those collective dreams of the primitive past that we can experience only through the ...”