“... of the author’ was underlined. When Joyce was told about the book, he remarked that Samuel Beckett had already read it and had praised it very highly. When he then read the book, which was the last novel he read in his life, Joyce said: ‘That’s a real writer, with a true comic spirit. A really funny book.’ He spoke to a French critic about ...”

“... on the nuclear codes?‘J.D. Vance! J.D. Vance!’ the forum chanted.I’ll take that as a yes.Ron Johnson, the Wisconsin senator, complained about ‘biological males competing against girls’. I suspect he will never know how sinister he sounds speaking about ‘girls’, but his transphobic contortions were entertainingly undercut by the public address ...”

“... hide-and-seek with society was carefully staged. In 1877, she refused to see Samuel Bowles, the editor of the Springfield Daily Republican, with whom she often corresponded. ‘Emily, you damn rascal,’ he shouted from the bottom of the stairs. ‘No more of this nonsense. I’ve travelled all the way from Springfield to see you. Come ...”

“... of the truth after an era of lies and fictions is itself a pleasure – the mind, as Dr Johnson indicated, delighting to rest on the stability of truth. Both writers appear to have a strong sense of the paradoxical – or perhaps it is merely that the paradoxes that appear in the investigation of men’s treatment of women demand recognition. Susan ...”

“... 1790s were ‘James Thomas, a negro … with the consent and approbation of his master’ and ‘Samuel Baron, son of the African King, Oaramby, alias Johnson’. Two sides of the African presence are revealed here. First, there was a subculture of slave ownership by white masters, although this was illegal under the ...”

“... Islam as the last great adversary. This was a good splashy topic for grand cultural seminars. Samuel Huntington in The Clash of Civilisations (1996) wrote at length about the West’s confrontation with Islam, ‘a different civilisation whose people are convinced of the superiority of their culture and obsessed by the inferiority of their power’. Today ...”

“... in the Occupied Territories, reversing the stated policy of every president since Lyndon Johnson. US officials have offered mild criticisms of a few Israeli actions, but have done little to help create a viable Palestinian state. Sharon has Bush ‘wrapped around his little finger’, the former national security adviser Brent Scowcroft said in ...”