“... word about a body of work that he had stuffed with deliberate discrepancies. On the other hand, he may have been aiming to have the last laugh. ‘People understand me so little,’ he said in one of the notebooks, ‘that they fail even to understand my complaints that they do not understand me’. In another note Kierkegaard explained that ‘after my death ...”

“... slip the content straight down the reader’s throat, for content is what matters most. This may beg a lot more questions, but except to critics it is clear enough. When W.H. Davies says he saw the wind dragging the corn by her golden hair into a dark wood, the startling and exciting information goes straight inside us. Complex reactions then ...”

“... phrase, yet it is telling enough when you consider how one person, out of a mass of others, may become suddenly vivid through an accident of acquaintance or perception. Nussbaum does not cite Mead on this useful point. She tries to recruit help further afield, from Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments. The name of Smith is cunningly brought in, and ...”

“... for the Performing Arts and the New York Historical Society. Long fascinated by the events of 10 May 1849, I couldn’t leave Manhattan without making a pilgrimage to Astor Place. But I could find no memorial to the 26 people killed in one of New York’s bloodiest episodes; nor was there any mention of the two actors, the American Edwin Forrest and the ...”

“... had perhaps thirteen illegitimate children in all, with various mistresses. Catherine, meanwhile, may have suffered four miscarriages and never had a child of her own. Lillias Campbell Davidson in her 1908 biography – still brilliant – writes that the queen would become known as ‘Catherine the humiliated, the wronged, the disdained’. But she gives the ...”

“... four words             conjugating present and past         that one may say ‘has been’       drunk and (I guess, not having seen it) sober             a half century at words for animals, people, plants the planet.         ‘Have you a story?’ Every poet who has read with Reading has ...”

“... the resumption of peace talks. Indeed, the US pressure on Abbas to keep Fayyad no matter the cost may be a way of scuttling the unity agreement without anything being said in public. It will, however, be risky for Abbas to abandon the reconciliation process, particularly if he is seen as having done so under American and Israeli pressure. After ...”

“... Metaphysics is called Metaphysics Gamma because there are two extant Metaphysics Alphas and (may we suppose) no one could bear to call one of them lesser, so references to the fourth book are given as Metaphysics Gamma (IV) or sometimes Metaphysics IV (3), this being the book where Aristotle outlines three versions of his famous ‘principle of ...”

“... well underway. It had many modern features. ‘The British,’ Scientific American reported on 19 May 1855, ‘have displayed great inferiority in military management in the present war with Russia,’ but it cannot be denied but that the national spirit for engineering enterprise has not failed to show itself in the most favourable light. Thus in the Crimea ...”

“... to Iraq and Afghanistan … How can there be any dispute about the virtue of what he has done? … May Allah grant our brother Nidal patience, perseverance and steadfastness, and we ask Allah to accept from him his great heroic act. Awlaki was writing from Yemen, where to commend an attack on American soldiers as they prepare for deployment in Muslim ...”

“... Hilliker, in 1958. In this new piece of work Ellroy offers his readers – and who knows what they may make of it? – a different kind of case history, one of compacted self-delusion, grandiosity and monstrous self-pity. Dutifully, I set to. I reread My Dark Places and once more exposed myself to the fanfaronade of his self-interrogation as he detailed the ...”

“... a group of girls away from home which establishes very quickly the possibility of a violence that may or may not be worked on them. ‘The quarters wavering in bottled heat, cots lined up in the big, dark rooms that are pitch black if you walk in out of the sun. Black, quiet, empty, and the screen door banging shut three ...”

“... its neglect of quantitative constraints and semantics. The suggestion that syntax and semantics may have evolved independently at first then combined leads to the study of the first shared lexicon, the commonalty of unitary learned symbols that resulted from the convergence of individual expressive choices into a socially accepted pattern, and that preceded ...”

“... have served during the conquest of Britain under Claudius nearly twenty years earlier. His face may not be the most prepossessing – he had a small chin and protruding ears – but it did belong to him alone. The stone was commissioned, not unusually, by the centurion’s grateful freedmen, or ex-slaves, Verecundus and Novicius. The first ‘securely dated ...”

“... tentatively, allowing his idol and besotted patron first dibs on divining the future – which may prove to be less golden than the sun’s shafts seem to promise. What if the guide has lost his touch, can no longer read the entrails? Speer’s detachment and poised ambiguity were not entirely affectations. He was a provincial snob who regarded ...”