“... representative of the Age of Reason. In particular, he hoped to challenge the condescension of Thomas Carlyle, who dismissed Hume as an associate of Voltaire and the French philosophes, and a slave to the ‘obscurations of sense, which eclipse this truth within us’. Hume had imagined, according to Carlyle, that the mechanistic logic with which he ...”

“...  Listen to Emily Wilson discuss Aristophanes with Thomas Jones on Among the Ancients, part of the LRB's Close Readings podcast. Find out more here.When​ Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion released ‘WAP’ in August 2020, ‘conservative’ commentators such as Tucker Carlson expressed outrage that the song might corrupt ‘your granddaughters’; Alyssa Rosenberg in the Washington Post celebrated it as an ‘ode to female sexual pleasure ...”

“... Antonello was born in the harbour city of Messina in Sicily around 1430 and died in 1479. No more than forty of his paintings survive and they are widely dispersed. Relatively few institutions are willing to lend their Antonellos, partly because of their scarcity and partly because most of the works are painted on wood, so that moving them is especially ...”

“... Church had registered a score of burials; in a town of just under 1500 inhabitants, that was more or less what would be expected. But in the half-year that followed he recorded more than 200 burials, a seventh of Stratford’s population. The plague’s fatality rate ranged from 50 per cent to 80 per cent, so as many ...”

“... Keiller writes this: ‘The combination of moving camera and interior monologue suggested some more or less comic attempt to represent consciousness, or perhaps artificial consciousness – the inner experience of an alienated and rather unreliable artificial flâneur.’ Preceded by factitious titles that credit the film as a production of l‘ufficio ...”

“... of the biographico-literary question I have just posed to both of us, I think I can formulate a more or less final decision about politics and Joyce. The three minutes are up. It is all a matter of definition. If the sort of politics I have been referring to did interest Joyce, then we at once understand their relevance to the man’s ...”

“... less technical language) as an adjective rather than a noun. You can have a satirical version of more or less anything – a satirical novel, a satirical play, a satirical car advert, a satirical news programme. But it also has some of the characteristics of a literary genre, particularly through the long and various tradition of verse satire. That tradition ...”

“... as MP for South Gloucester. It was a swashbuckling rise by a young man full of glamour. ‘I am more fond and proud of that young man than I can put into words,’ recorded Dalton, who had been in love with him for years. Dalton was not the only one: Crosland’s grace, charm and narcissism attracted people of all ages and orientations. ‘To a young ...”

“... to the factory that emerged with the Industrial Revolution; and its labour force was ‘more intensively exploited than any group of this size in history’. By a kind of poetic justice, of the three commodities Europe extracted from its plantations by such atrocious methods – cotton, tobacco, sugar – two have turned out to be semi-poisons. And ...”

“... succeeding generations to alienate the land in question. But they were not allowed to do so for more than a generation – and then a new settlement was needed. The principle that ‘perpetuity’ was forbidden existed before and throughout the reign of Henry VIII. ‘The mischief that would arise to the public,’ a Master of the Rolls later said, ‘from ...”

“... Partnership says: try throwing them into the air on a windy day, or into a corrie so they disperse more widely, or under a tree on the lower slopes.I should imagine that people who want to scatter someone’s ashes on a mountain, or leave a memorial there, do so because they consider a ‘Memorial Site for Contemplation’ municipal and tame. It’s just what ...”

“... In perhaps the most widely read book on the subject, What’s the Matter with Kansas? (2004), Thomas Frank argued that the upheavals of the 1960s generated fears and resentments that allowed issues such as abortion rights and racial equity to eclipse economics. Cowie’s book is both an ambitious history lesson and a contribution to this ongoing ...”

“... directed against men and male values, with the result that men are likely to be engaged by it in a more complicated way than women. And this will be true in Britain no less than in Argentina, Puig’s country and the country where Molina and Valentin sit incarcerated. For British heterosexual men do not kiss one another. In fact, I know of no country where men ...”

“... he published in 1964. He sent Bishop a draft of the poem in March 1962, explaining that it was ‘more romantic and grey than the whole truth, for all has been sunny between us. Indeed it all started from thinking about your letter, how indispensable you are to me, and how ideally we’ve really kept things, better than life allows really.’ In her ...”

“... better readers than others, whether of books or of reality, better in the sense of ‘truer’, more accurate and more revealing: and may well be helped to be so by being rid of the illusion that as ‘scholars’ they have some easy, advantaged road to the truth.This myth of scholarship seems extra liable to crop up ...”