“... called the Wahhabi Transreligious Friendship (WTF) Fund which bankrolls terrorists, though he may be working as a double agent for the US and/or Mossad. Ice is a corporate predator, and one of his schemes is an attempt to buy ‘DeepArcher’ (pronounced ‘departure’), a virtual reality application that erases a user’s actions instantly and ...”

“... by all those that woman alone can give to our imagination.’ ‘Little does he know’, we may hear the inventor of this dialogue murmuring. A man who is desperate about his poor luck in love – ‘I had just realised … that I loved her and that probably I was not loved and perhaps never would be’ – is consoled by the visit of a strange ...”

“... On​ 2 May 2008 Cyclone Nargis slammed into the Irrawaddy delta in Burma, killing 140,000 people overnight. Three million more were made homeless. Worse may be around the corner. Rising sea levels and shifting rainfall patterns threaten the livelihoods of the country’s poorest ...”

“... anyone it can accuse of spreading ‘chaos and disorder’. The blunt rhetoric of its communiqués may be refreshing after the speeches of Mubarak, his son Gamal and the industrialists who dominated the ruling National Democratic Party, with their formulaic promises of reform and their talk of the nobility of the Egyptian people but ten days ago in Tahrir ...”

“... trails – and they can manoeuvre with acrobatic flexibility. Some have suggested that the UFOs may be prototypes that belong to the US, citing precedents like the Roswell incident of 1947, when an object that many believed to be an alien craft crash-landed on a ranch in New Mexico: it wasn’t until the 1990s that the US government revealed that what was ...”

“... that ultimate test of human sympathy as an imaginative resource, has to stop somewhere. It may keep stretching our understanding to one person after another, but at its edges are the cardboard cut-outs of provincial types that it needs for its plausibly crowded scene of Midland life. Woloch is fascinated by the moment in Middlemarch when Eliot, almost ...”

“... 15 centimetres, until after two years what was your home lies 150 metres below the waves? This may be unimaginable to coastal dwellers today, but it was the fate of a dense population of farmers living 7500 years ago around what is now the Black Sea. Most humans have thankfully been spared such wild swings of weather and sea level, yet abrupt shifts in the ...”

“... statue of Akhmad Kadyrov, the president the Russians imposed on Chechnya who was assassinated in May 2004, stands in the main square. There are traffic jams in the streets, the cafés are busy, and people walk around with mobile phones. But most houses still don’t have running water. Chechens speak of random violence, entrenched criminality and permanent ...”

“... specialism was crystallography, the bearing of which upon the injustices of capitalist society may not be immediately apparent to the layman: but to Bernal that was immaterial. It was the essentially rational nature of all scientific thinking which in his view demonstrated the potential value of a scientific approach to any human problem; and at the age of ...”

“... a record of indefatigable research and meagre revelations, is stuffed with ‘probably’s’, ‘may’s’, ‘if’s’ and ‘just possible’s’, a case of seeking hopefully rather than arriving. Born in 1829 as the daughter of a London builder, Juliet came from ‘the artisan rather than the professional classes’. Miss Oliver is faintly surprised ...”

“... repertoire. Modern analysts do not esteem such notes (the article on analysis in The New Grove may well repudiate the method). They are deliberately superficial. As they are to be read at concerts, too great a detail would get in the way. The sadness is that many biographies of composers, and some studies of historical epochs, adopt the approach. This is ...”

“... when the latter depends for its main defence needs upon thousands of US military technicians may appear illogical, but such reverses of fortune and judgment are common enough in this context. The forces of Islam, deplored in the case of insurgent Iran, are deemed by many Western politicians to have new-found freedom-loving potential in the case of ...”

“... By ‘family structure’ many things may be intended. I shall take it here in two senses. First, in the sense of composition of the co-resident domestic group, as the historical sociologists call it. This means the knot of persons who live together, man, wife and sometimes, but by no means always, their children, their relatives, if any, along with their servants, now excessively rare ...”

“... restore its ‘consensual’ cohesion and thus ensure deliverance? Rationally to do so, they may expect to have answers to two questions. The first is who the élite actually are. To his credit, Higley has tried to find out, at least in Australia, where he works. Also to his credit, he doubts whether he has entirely succeeded. He decided that élites ...”

“... in this book is very doubtful. When you listen to the arguments in Measure for Measure, you may be impressed by the Duke’s grand formulation of the Contemptus mundi: there are ways of dealing with the fear of death, and the Duke specifies some of them, but Claudio is closer to the real thing and speaks like a man with a dread of it in his ...”