“... of Windsor, as soundproof as the walls of all those castles they processed around. Who knew of David Windsor’s dereliction of duty in favour of love (or whatever it was) until a week before the Abdication? Well, quite a lot of people actually, but not the readers of the popular (as in lower orders) press. Marion Crawford, governess to Lilibet and ...”

“... might sound like, because the technology wasn’t available. Dewey was born in 1859, which means the first election of his lifetime was one of the most consequential in American history, the 1860 contest that brought Abraham Lincoln to the White House. It wasn’t much of a conversation though, more an exercise in mutual incomprehension and ...”

“... on 15 occasions. Even on fairly modest assumptions about the length of election campaigns, that means that more than a year of his life must have been spent electioneering. He was elected to Parliament at 27, and sat in the House of Commons for more than twenty-eight years, before becoming President of the European Commission. He returned there only a year ...”

“... battle on a frozen lake, in which Alexander defeats the invading army of Teutonic Knights by means of an ingenious pincer-movement, or, as Arsenjuk puts it, a ‘V-shaped trap’. The idea of the trap had supposedly come to him the previous night after overhearing a ‘vulgar joke’ told around the ‘military campfire’. The ‘joke’ is in fact an ...”

“... institutional or doctrinal subculture and a relatively small nation-state, it is by no means fanciful to imagine that ideas can be passed around and down in more or less unmodified form. Such, for Rose, is the case for Zionism. But it is a selective Zionism, she contends, that rules the Israeli media and popular consciousness. Rose’s image of ...”

“... but the will that puts us in direct contact with reality. This mysterious thesis probably means that we understand the world through the force that drives it because it is the same as the force that drives us. O’Shaughnessy too claims a special position for the will, but his point is a different one. It is that we know a priori (in advance) that ...”

“... sound was heard . . . The Arts Minister was being praised. By ‘Arts Minister’ he presumably means Chris Smith, the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, rather than Alan Howarth, the Arts Minister and ex-Tory, but you can hardly blame Lord Bragg for his confusion: when Smith took over the post from Virginia Bottomley in May 1997, he was ...”

“... voters drops away to nothing. The closer it gets to zero, the more reason there is to vote, which means it will never get close to zero at all. But there is still a puzzle here: if it is worth voting in order to prevent the number of participants falling so low that a single vote can decide an election, then the worth of an individual vote is measured by how ...”

“... for any basket scored from a distance of over 23’9’’, a formidably difficult feat which means even the best players miss more often than they score). When a player gets the Hot Hand, his or her team-mates know to give them the ball and let fate take its course. Anyone who has watched a game in which a player acquires this gift will recognise the ...”

“... in a poor town in Virginia, finds himself branded as ‘gifted’ by a perceptive teacher. This means that he has ‘to do the harder English, which was a time suck, reading books’. By this stage of the novel, you know that he secretly respects good teachers and real learning, and that his scorn for academic endeavour is just bravado. Soon enough he is ...”

“... to someone who once worked for Nick Clegg tell him he doesn’t understand what democracy really means. But there he was, looking both older and younger than his years.He answered with patience the inevitable questions about whether he believed the Labour Party under Keir Starmer has what it takes to win the next election. He suggested that to seal the deal ...”

“... So it seems a wilful blindness to decide that Oppenheimer is Best Picture when that verdict means passing on several more coherent films – for me, that includes Poor Things, The Zone of Interest and Past Lives, all of which are nominated, but none of which feels American. The crack in the promise of the Academy Awards is that American pictures don’t ...”

“... But the idea is not the point. Or not the whole point. The point is the performance which, by means of the line written under a pronoun, overrides – such is the urgency of the message it bears – the conventions of ordinary language. Kipling himself bristles in that mark of the pen. Mrs Hill will find him there, will acknowledge him there. Since she ...”

“... poetic and critical discourse. What exactly, then, is Lentricchia up to? It’s possible that he means to extend and revise Hugh Kenner’s magisterial survey, The Pound Era (1971), in the light of more recent theoretical and literary-historical preoccupations. Like Kenner, he clearly regards the Modernist enterprise, with its insistence on ‘radical ...”

“... these inhabitants of the New World. The content of the Book, however, was less startling than its means of production: it had, Smith claimed, been translated from gold tablets that he unearthed from a local hillside. Smith, a farmer’s son, said he’d been directed to the hill by an angel, and the book was therefore evidence of Smith’s own status as a ...”