“... are not better than they were before the ceasefire. They are worse.’ Roddy Doyle’s Ireland may (O’Brien admits) look different to outsiders, and be notable for an absence of ‘wild Serbs or furious Croats’. Be not deceived. Just beneath this secular and European veneer dwells the ancestral dark: ‘God Land is in there, deep down. It whispers to ...”

“... Politics’ is a strange word, and the particular nature of its strangeness may explain why so many people feel confused by or alienated from political processes. It can refer high-mindedly to ‘the political ideas, beliefs or commitments of a particular individual’. But it can also be more or less value-neutral – or indeed suggest a complete lack of principle – when it is used to mean ‘activities or policies associated with government ...”

“... During the break-up with Kimberly Quinn that precipitated his break-up with the Home Office, David Blunkett is reported to have warned her: ‘The law is on my side. I know because I made the law.’ It doesn’t quite have the melodramatic chill of Judge Dredd’s ‘I am the law,’ but it comes close. And it’s easy to imagine Blunkett saying it, for it nicely sums up the tragically self-important view he took of himself, and of the executive branch of government, during his time in office ...”

“... to accuse its creator of shallowness. The facility for which Sargent would later become famous may have been evident in the speed with which he painted this picture (approximately seven feet square, it seems to have been completed in six weeks), but there is nothing facile or slick about the image itself, which is more likely to unsettle viewers than it is ...”

“... locals don’t love them. They’re convinced that they are members of the tribe. Their confusion may issue from Silicon Valley’s own favourite stories about itself. These days in TED talks and tech-world conversation, commerce is described as art and as revolution and huge corporations are portrayed as agents of the counterculture. That ...”

“... were never any fights between us,’ Jashodaben told a reporter last year. ‘In three years, we may have been together for all of three months. There has been no communication from his end to this day.’ Jashodaben, now in her sixties, is a retired teacher who lives with her brothers in the town of Unjha in Gujarat and spends much of her time praying. She ...”

“... if research breaks and parental leave cause delays. The junior doctor treating you in hospital may have more than ten years’ experience, across the different hospital departments, and it’s this general medical expertise that the government is relying on to enforce its ‘seven days a week’ NHS. Of course the NHS already operates 24 hours a day, seven ...”

“... Pacifists​ are rare. Most people believe that lethal violence may be used in self-defence, or the defence of others, against potentially lethal threats. Military action is justified by a collective institutional version of this basic human right, which sets an outer limit on the right to life. Lethal aggressors who cannot be stopped by lesser means are liable to lethal attack, and this does not violate their right to life so long as they remain a threat ...”

“... added, ‘to imagine any more exquisite addition to a seasoned ornithologist’s life list.’ In May 2012, the last courser to reach the British mainland – the first since 1984 – settled on a golf course in Herefordshire, and attracted many hundreds of excited birders. This is not the only such record: a cream-coloured courser was seen on the links of ...”

“... formalist reading of Derrida as a dissolver of truth and objectivity is wrong: Deconstruction may expose particular areas of aporia or vertiginous bewilderment in the logic of interpretation and explanation as these things are practised in the world, but Derrida has made it clear (especially in the 1989 ‘Afterword’ to Limited inc. but also in ...”

“... Are counter-factuals, then, a seductive but hopeless strategy for the historical imagination? David Lewis argued in Counterfactuals (1973) that warranted counter-factuals not only had to obey causal logic, they had to imply a real alternative world, of which it seemed there must be an infinite number. Hawthorn along with earlier critics rejects this ...”

“... of the communal violence in Yugoslavia, the United Kingdom’s internal war in Northern Ireland may at times appear trivial. At plenty of other times, however, it can appear that factional hatreds have locked the Province into a cycle of violence equal in ferocity to anything experienced in Sarajevo. Over the past two decades terrorists have murdered more ...”

“... with funds of inexperience and self-illusion. So he writes to his mother at the beginning of May: Good God! how superior is London to that despicable place Bristol! Here is none of your little meannesses, none of your mercenary securities ... The poverty of authors is a common observation, but not always a true one. No author can be poor who understands ...”

“... it by wit’. Stevie Smith’s poems are full of transformations and translations: a frog may become a prince, a typist gets sucked into the seascape of a Turner canvas in her lunch-hour. But what gives her verse its distinctive ring is her way of putting together the humdrum and the elevated in situation and vocabulary. In her poems large events ...”

“... Schools of Social Science none of whose members believe in or practise functionalism. They may be wrong. If so, then someone must either do a better job on the formal logic of functionalist explanation, or else argue that it is not a type of discussion that lends itself to formalisation. The rest of Douglas’s book suggests the latter alternative. The ...”