“... where he taught for thirty years and lived for the rest of his life. Part of what ‘non-art’ means for Ammons is described in an early poem as ‘the non-song/in my singing’. Singing is usually ghosted by saying (the opening line of his first book – ‘So I said I am Ezra’ – can be heard as either grand or casual). In fact, I can’t think of ...”

“... and airstrikes, American military planners felt that its imperial tasks could now be managed by means of an air war and a modest number of specialist shock troops. Throughout 2002, plans for the invasion of Iraq were reformulated to put a greater emphasis on special forces operations. Iraq would require a larger ground force than Afghanistan but would be ...”

“... between drawing and writing that he found the way out of his inability to write a novel and a means of putting his mental bric-à-brac in order. Like Alice, who can only reach the house in Through the Looking-Glass by turning her back to it, Gorey reversed the usual advice to ‘write what you know’ and wrote the apparent opposite of his own ...”

“... concerns about the work’s carbon footprint – the extraordinary scale of computation involved means that the carbon dioxide emitted in training Transformer is equivalent to 288 transatlantic flights – and about the way it looks at language. Because it is trained on text that Google harvests from the internet, its calculations reflect the way language ...”

“... figure’, which Hunter finds implausible. Like Amiel, Swire wants it both ways, which in her case means being in on the political action and having her opinions heard, but without the responsibility of an actual job.A private diary is a self-portrait, the speech delivered to the bathroom mirror, which does not always play so well outside. Swire has a ...”

“... the crisis in Ukraine would provide an opportunity ‘to demonstrate exactly what Global Britain means’. At RUSI’s annual land warfare conference in June, the current chief of the general staff, Patrick Sanders, praised the British army’s response to the crisis and said he would now have an answer for his grandchildren if they asked what he did in ...”

“... The connoisseur of deathbeds, of the fortitude of their occupants, of the composure of the atheist David Hume, the prison visitor who liked to watch executions, and appears to have lacked Johnson’s terror of futurity, was off somewhere on business when his wife stopped living. The journal deals with his five years as the widower formed by that crisis. His ...”

“... free economy-strong state dialectic, it was Labour that began to use unemployment as a deliberate means of deflation, and it was Labour ministers who brought the most clumsy and brutal prosecutions of journalists under the Official Secrets Act. I feel almost like apologising for mentioning anything so obvious, but neither Lloyd nor Brown give the matter any ...”

“... to that threat. As soon as the Security Council authorised its members to use ‘all necessary means’ to achieve the enforcement of its resolutions, he ordered a doubling of America’s already huge deployment. This immediately complicated the issue. In the view of military leaders, a deployment of roughly half a million men and women rendered the system ...”

“... Israeli officials, for a man detained as a suspect in the killings of two Palestinians. The man, David Axelrod, is not related to Leon Trotsky. A man with the same name, who is a descendant of Trotsky, was questioned briefly by the police in a case of mistaken identity. The arcane character of this item, which was at the top of that day’s menu, might make ...”

“... and won from a sceptical Cabinet. Routledge calls MacGregor a ‘political rhinoceros’. If he means MacGregor was an antediluvian creature who charged brainlessly at his opponents, he is wrong. In Britain, as in most of Western Europe, coal mining was under threat from cheaper sources in the US, India, China and Eastern Europe. Sooner or later, the choice ...”

“... of the art in the sociology and history of psychiatry (one has only to read the later effusions of David Cooper to recognise that some very silly things are said about madness). But it also makes sense in that ample room remains for sceptical doubt about the existence of a set of culturally and historically-transcendent conditions of madness. One feels ...”

“... Nora Nicholson. Nora had had a happy life and was 81 when she died, so the service was by no means a gloomy one. Sybil Thorndyke, herself 92 and crippled by arthritis, sat enthroned in the front pew surrounded by a posse of ladies who were scarcely younger. At a given moment, these attendants slid along the pew, got their frail shoulders under Dame Sybil ...”

“... Love, the heretical sect with which Lipsius was associated and which justified dissimulation as a means of outwitting clerical inquisitors. Renaissance Stoicism, like Familism, was not a philosophy of mere expediency. The changes and chances of war and of confessional rivalry encouraged the belief that permanent values could be located only within the ...”

“... were insights in Wallace’s treatment of divergence which Darwin could turn to advantage. As David Kohn observed in a cogent dismissal of Brackman2, it is first necessary to distinguish between divergence as a purely taxonomic conception and divergence as an explanatory principle, integral to the dynamics of natural selection. Both Darwin and Wallace ...”