“... of messages exchanged between members of al-Qaida during the raid that killed Osama bin Laden in May 2011; many ended: ‘destroy after reading.’ There was also a 220-page handwritten document inaccurately described by the CIA as bin Laden’s ‘journal’: for the most part, it is a transcription of family discussions during the last two months of bin ...”

“... Whatever may be the judgment of time on the intrinsic value of Renan’s contribution to the sum of knowledge, he can never lose his place among the few great names in the history of letters.’ This assessment from the 1901 edition of Chambers’s Encyclopedia, equally striking today for its confidence and its remoteness, summarises the conventional wisdom at the beginning of the 20th century ...”

“... Toft was suffering a violent and protracted miscarriage. But what exactly had she miscarried? It may have been a malformed placenta or foetus, or, as Karen Harvey suggests, a teratoma – a tumour containing bones, tissues, hair, teeth and flesh that can develop anywhere in the body.Whatever came out of Mary Toft after that long day in the fields, it seems ...”

“... the heart of Norse mythology is the Fimbulwinter, three winters with no summers in between, which may once have been a fact.In desperate circumstances, the poor die but the survivors expand their holdings. The famine may well have strengthened the post-Roman militarised elites who have left their traces in the giant mounds ...”

“... meaning to the very limits’? Can history live by metaphors alone? One answer is yes – we may want to hang on to biographical interpretations at any price.But there are tracks that respect historical destinies and also lead in other directions. Rimbaud himself announced such a possibility when he memorably said, in letters to friends, that ‘I is ...”

“... its mast’ring power, I scarce can fathom, thou wilt never know;My lighter passions into rhythm may glow;This is forever voiceless. Could the flowerOpen its petall’d thought, and praise the dowerOf sunlight, or the fresh gift of the dew,The bounteous air that daily round it blew,Blessing unweariedly in sun and shower,Methinks would miss its ...”

“... have seen the living human as the embodiment of a number of souls or life-forces; the corpse may host only a part of their identity or cohabit with another entity. It’s understandable that the dead should be angry or vengeful: after all, they have suffered a terrible calamity. There may be, as Freud proposed in Totem ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... travelled out of their country in order to be able to speak of it in safety. There are those who may find this assessment too pessimistic. But the country faces formidable problems – fundamentalism, the family succession, regional tensions, the economy, together with a generalised disenchantment and wish for reform. Since Saudi Arabia is essentially a ...”

“... looking for something interesting to investigate, though that is not wholly irrelevant. It may be true that too much has been written and published about him, but it is also true that there is a lot to write about. At the same time, however, the poet’s life, and especially the first half of it, has been examined with a persistence that is beginning ...”

“... the incongruity, since the form of the word suggests a diminutive (which according to the OED it may etymologically have been). The comedy of bigness and littleness explodes into the baroque extravaganza of the final tableau, with the monarch’s immolation on a blazing pyre of compulsive and polymorphous copulation: Here, glowing C– –t, with flaming ...”

“... But this is no longer necessarily true, as has been pointed out in these pages before now: there may be more people living now than all the people who have ever died. With over 5.4 billion of us alive today, on course to become 8.5 billion by 2025, we must think of the outnumbering dead as outnumbered – at least until population slows (at perhaps ten ...”

“... there has been a considerable volume of litigation in relation to closed material. Be that as it may, the Strasbourg court’s comment provided the inspiration for legislation in this country, and, in 1997 the Special Immigration Appeals Commission or SIAC was created to hear appeals in immigration or deportation cases where evidence is involved whose ...”

“... respected judge in this way. But is it wise to tie up senior judicial figures in inquiries that may take years to conclude and which are not guaranteed to produce any government response (or which produce only a partial government response) even when their reports emerge? Is it not the job of the Civil Service rather than the judiciary to produce policy ...”

“... foreign immigrants recently started drying up too, and those megapolises are now shrinking. London may be about to go the same way.I first arrived in St Albans one fine afternoon in late September. The schools were coming out. The boys and girls in their neat uniforms looked happy: black, Asian and white children laughing and chatting together. But a ...”