“... reader. Thomas was clear that if something doesn’t involve my body, it doesn’t involve me. I may not be physically present to you on the phone, in the sense of sharing the same material space, but I am bodily present to you all the same. Christianity concerns the transfiguration of the body, not the immortality of the soul. Aquinas certainly believed in ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... identity. Is it conceivable that the Howard-Brough breakdown could lead to such broad reform? It may be expecting too much from Rudd’s new government; but what counts is the direction so clearly projected in Coercive Reconciliation, which it would be reasonable to hope Labor would keep open, or at least not obstruct. In both Australia and the ...”

“... keep up the morale of politicos and plebs alike. No doubt such folklore is observable, but Wright may be exaggerating Iron Curtainism in retrospect, and conceding too much influence to its relics. ‘Intellos’ and speechwriters have certainly reanimated standard apocalyptic imagery since 2001, but its content isn’t really the same. Nor is any new ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... only from John Major’s little old ladies on bicycles, and from the Prayer Book Society – which may well have more members than those lobbies of fuel protesters. It was Cranmer’s intention that what was said in church should be ‘understanded of the people’. The minister was to speak ‘with a loud voice’, so turning his body ‘as the people ...”

“... a war with Prussia, or Nazi Germany, or the FLN. There are those who think that the tradition may be kept up this time around and that the joli mois de mai 2002 will produce levels of disorder comparable to those of May ‘68, as a ritual preparation for constitutional change. What do they know? I haven’t the faintest ...”

“... and passes over quickly, is looked upon with greater feelings of terror than the disease which may be more fatal, but more common. The words of another Scottish MOH, Alexander MacGregor of Glasgow, illustrate why this perception was wrong for measles: ‘In 1907-08 it gave notice of its presence by appearing on the outskirts of the city in the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... is the compression of historical time. ‘Is it really fifty years since Sergeant Pepper?’ you may ask. But the time lapse feels immaterial. The internet turns up a perpetual series of anniversaries, disparate moments from disparate epochs, and presents them all as equivalent and accessible in the here and now. ‘In 1981,’ the late cultural theorist ...”

“... the machinations of the liberal elite, when all he means is that Polly Toynbee and Andrew Marr may have had dinner in the same North London restaurant as Jon Snow. He wishes to stir up populist disgust at the idea of a liberal, self-satisfied elite – nice, coming from the back of a chauffeur-driven car or from the gold-plated elevator at Trump Tower ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... read them. Works like this are performances, and even if you don’t want to read every word you may want to watch them in action, as you can on UbuWeb. Seeing him read from No. 109 2.7.92-12.15.93 (1993) – a concrete poem that collects every word ending in the vowel sound / ə / or ‘schwa’ – you’re reminded of his admiring description of ...”