“... Sherston to himself. He now accepts that it is not necessary to approve of tactics which he may simply not understand, and after a brief spell in the pavilion – ‘retired hurt’ – he plays on until the match is over, wicket intact. For all the possible irony of its title, Sherston’s Progress finally endorses Pilgrim’s journey towards the ...”

“... and the finish. So much so, indeed, that when discussing the behaviour of atoms and electrons we may doubt whether these entities are more than convenient fictions introduced as part of the paraphernalia of the mathematical theory. But there is worse to come: it is easy to devise experiments involving two or more observers, and to find that their combined ...”

“... influenced the works of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, but his major literary legacy may have been an unwitting contribution to the prose style of Gertrude Stein. James’s masterpiece, which took him 12 years to write, was the two-volume Principles of Psychology. Published in 1890, it is still worth reading and is perhaps read by more ...”

“... about them. A cross-section of the bole of a Richardson willow no thicker than your finger may reveal 200 annual growth rings beneath the magnifying-glass. Much of the tundra, of course, appears to be treeless when, in many places, it is actually covered with trees – a thick matting of short, ancient willows and birches. You realise suddenly that you ...”

“... feeling its shape from the outside. Some information can be obtained, and certain gross functions may be localised, but we really must get inside the brain if we are to make much progress, and identify the details of its circuitry. Unlucky Gall’s materialistic approach led to his prohibition from teaching in Austria, his persecution by the Church, and his ...”

“... When they face a crisis, it is dangerous for banks to have debtors take a hit. To do so may scare the horses, risking a stampede of deposits out of the door. Debtor discipline then has the effect of making a bad situation worse. Extended liability was abolished for just that reason. And the complex debt instruments issued by banks a hundred years ...”

“... cash for clothes and clubbing. The young with the energy to get out of their beds, that is. In May 2011, two days before the election, I could find not one poster in a window, not one canvasser on a sunny street. And yet each lamppost was decorated with little flags for each of the four contesting parties – as if the council had been told to mark the ...”

“... On a summer morning in late May or early June of 415 BCE, the inhabitants of Athens woke to the discovery that the city’s numerous Herms – images of Hermes consisting of a square-cut stone pillar topped by a bearded head, and displaying an erect phallus, but otherwise aniconic – had been vandalised during the night: their faces had been cut about, and their phalluses may also have been damaged ...”

“... Bugg, a teenager with dead eyes, rudimentary chords and an unexpected UK number one album, who may be the closest thing we have to a homegrown dust-bowl troubadour: he’s from the east Midlands. (Typical lyrics: ‘I go back to Clifton to see my old friends/The best people I could ever have met/Skin up a fat one, hide from the Feds.’) And at the other ...”

“... highlighted by the radical changes currently being made to the legal aid system, that the process may be accelerating into a critical and damaging phase. To its credit, Oxford has managed to get one of the most sophisticated British scholars of modern public law to produce a brief and readable account of the interpenetration of these two constitutional ...”

“... and art, according to Nietzsche, is the best veil (‘We have art,’ he remarked, ‘that we may not perish of the truth’). Fundamentally we are disgusted by life, and we are paralysed by this disgust when and if we acknowledge it. What Nietzsche calls the Dionysian, Critchley and Webster usefully suggest, is ‘the introduction of a kind of lethargy ...”

“... author (or his female narrator) could imagine. The answer – sovereignty over their husbands – may disappoint; we would prefer if she had said ‘over themselves’. But that concept had yet to come. Chaucer took more risks with his representation of Criseyde. Troilus, her suitor, is a courtly lover so passive that he now reads like a caricature (a ...”

“... system.’ Rosanvallon is quite aware of the obvious drawbacks. Instead of ‘legibility’ we may get merely the maximal visibility of one person – as with Louis XIV, who constantly displayed himself before the public while the actual decision-making was done in secret by his Council.Rosanvallon concedes that presidentialism – whose current form ...”

“... led by Jean-Luc Mélenchon, lost its initial momentum. In the run-up to the European elections in May, opinion polls showed that the French would vote on the basis of national issues, which persuaded Macron to repeat the two gambles he had taken in 2017: that the only serious challenger would be Le Pen, and that by dramatising the choice between his own list ...”

“... we “hear” is our own ventriloquising of ambiguously directed address, though we may, and in some cases certainly do, construe this as overhearing a distinctive poetic voice.’ So Frank O’Hara addresses a leaf: ‘Leaf! You are so big!/How can you change your/colour, then just fall!’ and John Ashbery talks to a fictional reader who is ...”