“... there are ecstatic births, orgasmic births, traumatic births, and what would be traumatic for one may not be for another. How we make sense of such experiences has always depended on the contingencies of biology as well as those of time and place, gender, class and race.For those in industrialised countries where reproductive care is more readily – if by no ...”

“... There is a masked ball where everyone is wearing some kind of bird face, and the avenger, who may at this point just be the faithful old retainer, since all we see of him is his suit, broad, stooped shoulders and magnificently feathered hawk’s head, rather surprisingly performs a few magic tricks, releasing doves into the air from what seemed to be ...”

“... each patient how tightly they wish to adhere to ‘best practice’, discuss which side effects may be acceptable to them and which wouldn’t, and generally tailor their care as much as possible. The government’s health policy reached new levels of absurdity last October, when it was announced that GPs would be paid £55 for every diagnosis of dementia ...”

“... exhibition in 2006, and at Tate Modern’s Duchamp, Man Ray, Picabia in 2008. That the pairing may seem a strange one – despite their friendship and collaboration – is testament to the different ways in which both artists have been typecast. The curators are keen to point out that each was mercurial from the start, assuming identities and casting them ...”

“... that ‘dancing is often the only real, the only serious business’ in these movies, but we may not have remembered how much and how variously they are about dancing. In Shall We Dance a Russian star of classical ballet played by Fred Astaire wants to tap like Fred Astaire, although his manager thinks this slip into popular nonsense ...”

“... voters get most of England’s news, often more quickly and more loudly than our own. On 13 May, an immigration enforcement van was spotted in Pollokshields, part of Sturgeon’s Glasgow Southside constituency. The van, in which two Indian men had been detained, was quickly surrounded by protesters demanding their neighbours’ release. The police were ...”

“... of the top and bottom of the quennet give the effect of a long Essex horizon, around which an eye may dart and pick out things in their severalness:Deserted benches      Resting gull      Tilted boat                                       Rotten hullThe short middle lines can be a bit like rivulets of ...”

“... of the future’ would bring about ‘race suicide’ by refusing to bear children: which may be a reason why he embarked on fatherhood so energetically, with a variety of women in addition to his wife. One of Wells’s most famous liaisons was with Rebecca West, mother of the author of the latest Wells biography. They met in 1912 when she was 19, he ...”

“... of her fright. The noir effect is a stand-in for the movies in general, and the corpse may well be Turner’s career. It’s all too much for her, and she goes off on a drinking binge, her old habit. The film is Vincente Minnelli’s The Bad and the Beautiful (1952), soon to be shown in cinemas across the country. Pauline Kael thought it was ...”

“... On Sunday 16 May, a day before the IDF launched its long-awaited, well-planned attack on the civilian population of Rafah, the Israeli chief of staff, Major-General Moshe (Boogey) Ya’alon said it was ‘almost the last chance’ for such an operation and that ‘special conditions were in place’ for an imminent attack ...”

“... flawed advantages of being ‘authorised’: there are no anecdotes here about what Louis B. Mayer may or may not have done to the pubescent Judy Garland, or others in his thrall. The worst that is said of the man many still speak of as a monster is that he was a ‘part-affectionate, part-retributive tyrant’. Where Mr ...”

“... vocabulary to do justice to dramatic effect. The impact, experienced immediately by the recipient, may be translated in recollection – and all dramatic criticism is ‘recollection’ – into various thought-moulds, and it is probable that the two views of his acting derived from similar immediate experiences. I would lay great stress on immediacy: what ...”

“... escape the biological round of cultivation and consumption; it is a hopelessly natural object. It may, however, as anything in nature may, find its way into literature, and thence into the literature of literature, or in this instance Nature and Language. The subject of this jaunty, promising but muddled book is the ...”

“... noun as object (and not a gerund or infinitive), and Wv5 indicates that the participle jazzed up may be used adjectivally. This information is not provided to Chambers-users, although they, on the other hand, are specifically informed by sep that they may properly say ‘Those barbarians have jazzed Palestrina up’ as ...”

“... two of his colleagues ‘enemies of the people’ for ruling that the then prime minister, Theresa May, couldn’t trigger Article 50 – which started the process of leaving the EU after the Brexit referendum – without a vote in Parliament.In recent times complaints of judicial activism have often concerned the interpretation of the Human Rights Act and the ...”