“... why, therefore, did not such misfortunes affect everybody equally? Why, moreover, were some people more successful than others when they manifestly didn’t work any harder? This recalcitrant ‘Why me?’ question of the particularity and selectivity of ill and good fortune was what Zande set out to solve in terms of witchcraft, or, in the case of their ...”

“... in the styles of various great authors. It is an important and a depressing book, its importance more or less in direct proportion to the depth of the gloom it sheds. With luck we may one day look back on it as the last ‘English’ novel. It is the 1920s. Timothy Harcombe, the narrator, works with his father Clement, a faith-healer, at the Chemical Theatre ...”

“... literature?’, questions which, difficult enough in themselves, lead inevitably to questions even more awkward, such as ‘what is a subject?’ And it is admitted that these difficulties are compounded by the obscurity, held to be necessary in at least some cases, of many of the texts that explore them.It would seem that the present collection is somewhat at ...”

“... side with works of poetry and fiction, and it never occurred to me to think of one being less or more “humane” than the other.’For a long stretch, though, of his childhood and early adolescence, Auden liked to present himself as the icily preoccupied boy-boffin, his playbox ‘full of thick scientific books on geology, metals and machines’. He ...”

“... the continuing democratic vigour of the American novel is that the great wave of Modernism was no more than a ripple by the time it reached New England’s shores. American writers simply did not have the time or energy to spare for all that self-scrutiny and existential doubt, that Eliotian difficulty. There was a job to be done, in that the young nation was ...”

“... with Aristotle’s distinction, and notes its influence on Catholic theology. But he overlooks a more interesting theological aspect of the accidental, which is the doctrine of Creation. This has nothing to do with how the world got started, which is the domain of the scientist. It has to do with the fact that for Christian belief, everything in the world ...”

“... least a chance that in forming this image your imagination will have tapped into a picture that is more than five hundred years old – Albrecht Dürer’s woodcut of the outlandish pachyderm, made in 1515. Dürer himself never saw a rhino. He too had to imagine the beast, so your imaginings might have something to do with his imaginings, which ‘bodied forth ...”

“... murals to challenge the prevailing narrative of Washington’s life and, indeed, American history more broadly. His murals were intended to show that the country’s economic growth and territorial expansion – Washington took part in both – rested on the exploitation of slave labour and the violent seizure of Native American land. Among ...”

“... in South Wales and the London-based group Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners. It’s a far more optimistic portrayal of activism and agency than earlier movies about the dispute, such as Billy Elliot (2000), in which the son of a Durham miner flees poverty and cultural conservatism to perform in the West End.In an essay published just after the ...”

“... But while Byron was disowned by the Victorians, embarrassed that this ‘huge sulky dandy’, as Thomas Carlyle called him, should have received so much adoration and respect, Felicia Hemans’s reputation grew, and her work went out of print only after the First World War. Her importance in dictating the taste for patriotism, obedience and sacrifice in ...”

“... at least – white. But most women philosophers before the late 20th century needed something more: access to a man who held the uncommon view that women – or at least certain women – could be serious thinkers too. The odds were long. For centuries, philosophers hammered prejudice into reason. Aristotle’s claim that in women reason was ‘not ...”

“... when assembled together, would magically turn into a collective theory of literature, seems more detached from reality than is usual even in discussions of the politics of ‘theory’. Kernan’s argument is as reductive and incoherent in general as it is inaccurate and incoherent in detail. To call it tendentious would be to ascribe to it a ...”

“... books about Ulysses, mentioning only two previous ones by himself. He weeds out bad ideas and adds more promising ones, always with acknowledgement to other critics: and it is impressive that he had plenty more material available for the centenary collection, A Starchamber Quiry, just after printing his own book. He puts a ...”

“... Royal Academy, only a few years after its founding in 1768; and it was there that he may have met Thomas Rowlandson, the other outstanding caricaturist of his generation.Alice Loxton spins her exuberant popular history around that friendship, and calls on their mutual friend Henry Angelo for testimony on Gillray’s early mastery: ‘The facility with which ...”

“... to please. And, though Jane Austen may not have dwelt in the best of all possible worlds, it was a more congenial corner of a more congenial world than most. Even a reader who leans towards opinions like these must regret the absence of a more closely reasoned case. The ...”