“... if the correspondence that followed soon retreated into an altercation about what Just William may or may not have got up to.Blake Morrison’s As If, a study of the Bulger case, was published in 1997. The conclusions to be drawn from reading it are not particularly original: the boys should never have been tried in an ...”

“... He and I taught together at University College London in the 1970s. These personal allusions may savour of the excessive. Let me plead that they serve as an introduction to the uncertainties and inconsistencies of his experience of life, to his changing fortunes, contrasting reputations, to the human interest and eccentric charm of Stephen. Of the ...”

“... to the decline in bee populations. Without any consensus on ultimate causes, some fear we may end up following the example of commercial fruit growers in the Hindu Kush, who resorted to pollinating fruit tree flowers individually by hand more than a decade ago when native pollinators were temporarily exterminated. It didn’t take them long to grasp ...”

“... to have been unembarrassable. Yet that’s not how it worked over here. David Laws’s 22 Days in May, which recounts the negotiations that preceded the formation of the coalition government from the inside, explains how it happened that in our case the winners actually ended up winning. Hardly surprisingly, it’s not that Lib Dem politicians emerge as more ...”

“... I might already have protruding breasts. We spend so much of the day with trunks upright that I may signal my attractiveness from the front, not just from the rear. I am female but that does not necessarily imply you are male. Chimpanzees, bonobos and humans all have same-sexed kin, friends and sometimes same-sexed sex partners: our precursors were surely ...”

“... absent, second-person listener, whose identity remains shadowy. At first it seems that this may be a lover: ‘Just before you left me for the first time I had a dream and you were in it.’ We later learn that this person is a woman, but not her name, which Jem refuses to tell another friend when asked. Then it transpires that she is more likely a ...”

“... and BMWs the new rich drive. Ladas and Zhigulis have features that are all their own. Handbrakes may or may not work: ‘It’s just for decoration,’ my friend Sasha once explained. New drivers must be shown each special feature of the gears and clutch. ‘Just force it’ is a common tip for Lada owners. Russians ...”

“... to adultery. Since we are not told much about Othello and Desdemona’s sex-life, the connection may seem gratuitous. Greenblatt linked the two by interpreting a phrase of Iago’s, when he is describing his plot to entrap Othello, to mean that he will appeal to a guilt in Othello about the excess of his erotic feelings for his wife: ‘that he is too ...”

“... Ireland, and from all the talk you might suppose he’d been around the globe. Because That They May Face the Rising Sun does without points of reference, or markers you might use to judge where you are, the very particular place it describes also feels like the only place on earth. It’s a clever trick, and it makes for good stories. Jamesie likes to tell ...”

“... with the Pakistan government. The government denies this. Army officers admit that the strikes may have killed scores of al-Qaida fighters, and that the ISI may have supplied intelligence for the operations, but the missiles have also killed civilians, including pro-government tribal elders. The Pakistan army believes ...”

“... Maxwell Fyfe’s speech came in the triumphal wake of the Congress of Europe, held in The Hague in May 1948 with Churchill as its honorary chairman and 750 delegates from 17 European countries. Although the congress possessed no governmental authority, its cultural committee drew up a charter of fundamental rights to be enforced by a continental supranational ...”

“... perhaps everyone should. But if someone is determined to rob you or grab you on the street, there may not be much that you, the average person going to the shops or walking home from a friend’s, drunk or distracted or tired from your week, can do. Given the unlikeliness of a random attack, even in the dead of night, it’s logical not to alter your ...”

“... of the old remain in our new ways of thinking. The 18th century still lives secretly within us and may – alas – return.’This metaphor may have sounded more mild and innocent in 1938 than it does now. And in a later text, Rational Materialism (1953), the Gothic shades and magical thinking have turned into ...”

“... the Church against the Lutheran threat, which Wolsey took very seriously (and which the reader may suspect to have owed some of its following to anti-clericalism). If Wolsey’s plans for reforms were limited, it was because fundamental change was unnecessary. If they were not fully implemented, it was because he prudently avoided confrontation. He was ...”

“... the diaspora, and the scattering of Jews amongst peoples holding the Christian Faith, it may have been unfortunate, both for these peoples and for the Jews themselves, that the culture contact between them has had to be within neutral zones of culture in which religion could be ignored: and the effect may have been ...”