“... 1919 put it, ‘Einstein Theory Triumphs. Stars Not Where They Seemed or Were Calculated to Be, but Nobody Need Worry.’ But still. But still. Quantum theory suggests that there is a vanishingly small chance that a kettle full of water on the hob will freeze rather than boil. This is disturbing, if only in a vanishingly small way. And if the stars are ...”

“... and pamphlets easily surpasses in size (and in price) the principal older collections edited by F.C. Mather and Edward Royle, although for the hardy there remains a less easily available set put together by Dorothy Thompson, the doyenne of Chartist studies. Claeys is a past master of the art of compilation, having ...”

“... on the head. As is the way with new historicist interpretation, both expositions proceed by relating a crux in the play to a prominent item in the surrounding or preceding non-literary culture; in these cases, theological and religious culture. In the chapter on Othello the external correlative, or stimulus, is the opinion in moral theology, going ...”

“... are as colourful as they are improbable. Picasso liked the mystery, was eager for no one to be sure what he would do next. Told that Joanna Drew, a curator at the Hayward Gallery, had found cocoons huddled in the slits of his Man with a Sheep, Picasso said that at Vauvenargues one day he had felt a wasps’ nest between the sheep’s legs; nothing more ...”

“... that suggest (or do they?) that those moral, metaphysical and historical aperçus are not to be trusted, that his narrator is in fact a pretentious and immature fantasist. The most obvious stylistic hangover from the first two books is Thirlwell’s stubbornly flat insistence on repeating elements of a sentence in close proximity, like Warhol ...”

“... Reactions​ by the international commentariat to Trump and Netanyahu’s joint press conference on 15 February focused largely on Trump’s pronouncements, specifically on what seemed to be his abandonment of America’s long-standing bipartisan support for a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict ...”

“... The​ Italian newspaper Il Sole 24 Ore recently outed (or claimed to be outing) the writer of the Neapolitan novels concealed behind the pseudonym Elena Ferrante. Has the press – or anyone else – any moral right to do this? Is an author’s identity an aspect of her personal privacy, to be disclosed or withheld as she chooses? Or is it information which belongs as much in the public domain as the books she writes? Anonymous and pseudonymous publication has a long history ...”

“... and schoolmasters who trudged through fields, knocked on doors and filled in paper schedules by hand in exchange for a shilling and sixpence. In 1801, these census enumerators were required only to record the number of men, women and children in each dwelling, and to classify each inhabitant as occupied in ‘agriculture’,‘trade, manufactures or ...”

“... on our schools, infrastructure and hospitals’. She wants, in other words, that Northern Ireland be returned to direct rule from Westminster, and that Bradley start paying out the £1 billion that Theresa May was forced to pledge last year in exchange for the DUP’s help in propping up her minority government. The DUP’s deputy leader and leader at ...”

“... The​ posthumous progress in English of the Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard (1931-89) is marked by deaths: those of his majoritarian and minoritarian translators David McLintock and Ewald Osers, in 2003 and 2011 respectively; and in 2015 that of Carol Brown Janeway, his publisher at Knopf, his unlikely champion over decades (because, for all his influence and cultishness, Bernhard in English never exactly sold), and the translator herself of the posthumous My Prizes, in an exquisitely bound volume from Notting Hill Editions, with a justly amused introduction by Frances Wilson: ‘Few writers have received more applause than Thomas Bernhard, Austrian novelist, playwright and enfant terrible, and few have bitten more sharply the hand that clapped ...”

“... I knew​ very little about Víctor Barrio before, slightly hungover, I was asked by BBC World News on the morning of 10 July last year to comment on his televised death. It was the first time a matador had died in a professional Spanish bullfight since 1985. I’d spent a number of summers going to corridas when I was researching a book on the cultural politics of Spain’s transition to democracy in the late 1970s, and became convinced that bullfighting was an underexplored chapter in this history ...”

“... on Virdi’s previous case, I felt a duty to do all I could to prevent what appeared to me to be another witch hunt. Gurpal came into the office and was exactly the way I remembered him at the Hackney Empire, warm and straightforward. The timing of the decision to investigate him was suspicious: Virdi was at this point seeking election as a local ...”

“... couple of times when actual politics, the thing itself, knocked on the classroom door asking to be let in. I happened to be in a politics lesson when David Cameron was declared the new leader of the Conservative Party in December 2005 (‘He’ll never get it,’ our teacher had said a ...”

“... Ennui is French but it is related to annoy, and spree may come from Old Norse, or it may actually be French, an elision of esprit. The OED merely murmurs about the word’s ‘obscure origin’. Still, whatever their derivation, the words do seem to belong to quite different realms of affect and activity, which themselves rest on an old and interesting – if ...”

“... as often) she runs into serious trouble, implicated in a death for which, eventually, a debt must be paid. The setting is luxurious, the lifestyle hedonistic, the climate oppressively hot. Prodigious amounts of alcohol are consumed. As events accelerate towards a violent finale, the reader is kept guessing. How severe will the consequences ...”