“... in’ or ‘taking out’, as porous or trussed, open or closed, is not clear, but that may be the point: like the two states that underlie them, these two strategies are bound up with each other. In this light his collecting was another way of being porous to the world, and his being porous another way to defend against images and objects – that ...”

“... an antique fair. That’s just how we are I’m afraid.’ This is an arch piece of marketing from Richard Osman, promoting his detective novels to an American readership. There’s no reason to suppose that British people are better at hiding in plain sight than anyone else. However, they do like a murder story, and a thriving industry has grown up around ...”

“... England, progresses through satirists such as Walter Map (under Henry II) and Chaucer (under Richard II), through the attempts to reanimate classical verse satire in the late Elizabethan period, on (at length) through the 18th century, right up to Armando Iannucci’s The Thick of It. Sperrin sees satire as being ‘primarily concerned with regime-level ...”

“... The storm broke because of the surprising inroads of the New Criticism into the academy. We may consider the New Criticism rather tame, and appreciate it for introducing a tougher pedagogical stance, but traditional scholars feared that its exclusive emphasis on the specifically literary qualities of novel or poem would isolate these from the ...”

“... their mock at our accursed lot.If we must die, o let us nobly die,So that our precious blood may not be shedIn vain; then even the monsters we defyShall be constrained to honour us though dead!O kinsmen! we must meet the common foe!Though far outnumbered let us show us brave,And for their thousand blows deal one death-blow!What though before us lies the ...”

“... more referred to than read. Its title, together with the generalised sense of ‘Whig history’, may have entered the language, but beyond having a vague awareness that Whiggish history is, in the terms used by another historical classic of the same vintage, a Bad Thing, many of us might struggle to state Butterfield’s argument any more precisely, and ...”

“... part of the European Union’s Emissions Trading Scheme, and thus are part of a microcosm of what may become a worldwide carbon market. One doesn’t usually think of universities as big carbon dioxide emitters, but the capacity at two of Edinburgh’s three highly efficient combined heat and power centres pushes them over the 20 megawatt threshold of ...”

“... strange old books and ornaments brought from the old country. They know the words of old songs. It may even be that second-generation immigrants, feeling discriminated against, misunderstood and rejected by America, seek to immerse themselves in the culture and ideals of their parents’ homeland, fabricating a hybrid identity for themselves based on an ...”

“... sums of money, Purdy’s parents divorced, and his mother, Vera, began running a boarding house. Richard, his older brother, had a successful stint as an actor before alcoholism ended his career and forced him to return home. Snyder refers to him as ‘an aspiring actor and gay youth’ who felt stuck in a conservative Midwestern town, but there is no ...”

“... Week one:​ 3-9 May. Along with toilet paper, which remains scarce, condolence cards are sold out, though birthday cards are plentiful. Popular images include a trail of footprints in the sand and an angel with its forehead pressed into the crook of its arm.As confirmed American coronavirus deaths pass 67,000, the president declares, in an interview with Fox News held inside the Lincoln Memorial, where events are traditionally banned: ‘They always said nobody got treated worse than Lincoln ...”

“... and the London Waste Ltd plant in particular, was investigated by the television journalist Richard Watson for Newsnight. A predictable story of fudging, economy with the truth, buck-passing and ministerial denial. Until August 2000, London Waste was guilty of mixing relatively safe bottom ash with the contaminated fly ash that the process was ...”

“... or the magical or any such claptrap. I despise myths and legends and their ilk. I believe that Richard Dawkins does not go nearly far enough when he says that astrologers should be prosecuted for fraud. Instead, priests and imams and monks and rabbis from every religion should be thrown into prison, unless and until they can prove the truth of their ...”

“... But this is no longer necessarily true, as has been pointed out in these pages before now: there may be more people living now than all the people who have ever died. With over 5.4 billion of us alive today, on course to become 8.5 billion by 2025, we must think of the outnumbering dead as outnumbered – at least until population slows (at perhaps ten ...”

“... foreign immigrants recently started drying up too, and those megapolises are now shrinking. London may be about to go the same way.I first arrived in St Albans one fine afternoon in late September. The schools were coming out. The boys and girls in their neat uniforms looked happy: black, Asian and white children laughing and chatting together. But a ...”

“... British manufactures out of some foreign markets. Industrial production in the UK contracted in May. At some point, it is believed, businesses will fail, throwing their workers onto the state, and the British public finances will disintegrate: a long period of prosperity will come to an end. Like all defensive alliances, the euro is also an act of ...”