“... invention, elements of an intended meaning, and they come trailing all kinds of associations which may not have much to do with their material locations out there in the world. The ‘brilliant’, the ‘deep blue’ New England air and the irremediable Californian innocence that crop up so frequently in Superior Women really belong to literature or mythology ...”

“... success on behalf of the poor – the formalising and regularising of discretionary payments – may have the unintended consequence of making them poorer. If basic payments are index-linked, then, indeed, the discretionary element is better turned into a formal right. However, where basic payments decline in real terms, the capacity for more compensatory ...”

“... By being ornamental in this sense they were able to be meaningful in others which Michelangelo may not have been fully conscious of and which are hard to put into words. There is no discussion here of the respectable channels provided in the Renaissance for the sublimation of homosexuality, nor of the metaphors then available with which a celibate might ...”

“... always remains that there is still much that is concealed, secret and mysterious. Dreyfus may not have been guilty of selling military secrets to the Germans, but who then delivered the information, recorded in the celebrated document discovered in 1894? The so-called Stavisky was certainly a crook, and he must have had protectors in high places to ...”

“... peculiar and transient difficulties of one offshore island at an awkward corner in its history. It may be time for another spin of the wheel in the 1980s, with the revival of doctrines of sound money and good housekeeping under Reagan and Thatcher. Now Keynes has admittedly not been getting any younger in the meantime, so the hypothetical views upon economic ...”

“... the voluminous information already on record, but runs amiably and quite deftly over the course, may have its uses. Not everybody has the time or the desire to tackle the thousand pages of Karl’s Joseph Conrad, or the shelf of books – Jocelyn Baines, Norman Sherry, Zdzislaw Najder, Eloise Knapp Hay – that would provide a richer and more chaotic account ...”

“... scene. ‘There are hundreds of objects here for which there are no words in Yiddish. They may not even have names in English. All life in America keeps constantly changing. How can such a nation create a real literature?’ Isaac must have agreed at least up to a point with this defeatist view. Although only just 30, he chose to stick to Yiddish as ...”

“... array of Russian thinkers such as Leo Shestov, who emphatically rejected the logic of identity: A may be equal to A, but then again it may not. There is some overlap between Shestov and a thinker who is now better-known, Mikhail Bakhtin; both celebrate forms of discourse that dispense with a fixed subject position and set ...”

“... an exam, being acquitted of criminal charges, trumped up or valid, receiving medical treatment may all require the bribery of public officials. The kickback plague is endemic, inflating by as much as 50 per cent the cost to the state of everything from weapons to highway construction. That the principal players in ‘the greatest corruption story in human ...”

“... Porter’s poem begins by acknowledging separation, remorse, confusion and affection: In wet May, in the months of change, In a country you wouldn’t visit, strange Dreams pursue me in my sleep, Black creatures of the upper deep – Though you are five months dead, I see You in guilt’s iconography, Dear Wife, lost beast, beleaguered child As the poem ...”

“... fatality rate ranged from 50 per cent to 80 per cent, so as many as one in four townsfolk may have been infected. Women, who tended to the sick, suffered disproportionately, as did the old and the young. Three months before plague struck Stratford, a young woman named Mary gave birth there to a son, William. She and her husband had lost their first ...”

“... forum was kept clean but the stone flooring, which had worn paper-thin, was not replaced. There may still have been rich people living comfortably, and there are signs that some big landowners extended their estates as smaller ones had to sell up, but it didn’t do them much good, once the local markets and the middle-range consumers on whom their ...”

“... I met some of the leading figures in Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement in Taiwan at the end of May, they told me that the bill was just one of several urgent issues. None of them anticipated that a new, spectacular phase of Hong Kong’s struggle for democracy was about to unfold. We met at an international conference commemorating the thirtieth ...”

“... expansively to be useful. Even to list the things that affect women’s lives disproportionately may be to include too much, given the tendency for those at the bottom of social hierarchies to suffer more from everything, whether famine or plague or economic recession. There are all sorts of problems in the world, and feminists must focus their energies. To ...”

“... Adams locates at Penselwood in Somerset), before beating the Vikings at the Battle of Edington in May 878 and imposing on them a treaty and a boundary, which – for once, and for a while – they respected. This started the long process of resistance, reconquest, English unification and English overlordship that would lead to his grandson Athelstan calling ...”