“... sleep, so a placenta does not slosh, at any rate not when it is functional in the womb, as here, by analogy, it is imagined to be. For figurative language to succeed it must work at the level of ordinary meaning as well as at the level of allusion. Ondaatje’s images fail sometimes to achieve this balanced ambiguity. His ...”

“... off in November 1801, they, like many other Britons, were taking advantage of the peace brought by the Treaty of Amiens to see for themselves the country of which they had heard and read such lurid accounts. Off they went, gentry and servants: ‘Lord and Lady Mount Cashell, Helena Jane and me pack’d in the Family Coach, with Mary Lawless, Mary ...”

“... every aspect and period of America’s past’. No one who knows his earlier writings is likely to be surprised by its strengths and weaknesses. For better or worse, A History of the American People is vintage Johnson. Johnson proudly asserts that he makes no effort to ‘conceal’ his ‘opinions’. What this means is ...”

“... There often seems to be a connection between the style of an art historian or critic and that of his or her favourite artist. Reading Tim Clark on Courbet, it is easy to see the reasons why the writer chose his subject: iconoclasm, a bold and aggressive rejection of stylistic precedence and traditional modes of expression are common to both ...”

“... notorious answer we’ve been given in the last forty years was a triumphant negation, uttered by Margaret Thatcher in an interview with Woman’s Own magazine in 1987: ‘There is no such thing!’ The left has ensured that Thatcher’s words have not been forgotten; the right has occasionally sought to remind people of her next sentence: ‘There are ...”

“... largely undetected Labour surge in the run-up to the 2017 general election, Theresa May might now be steering us through the Covid-19 crisis: trusted, sensible and reliable, however costively unimaginative and incapable of the nimble feats of very un-Conservative gymnastics so far performed by Boris Johnson’s ...”

“... of the last few years, had a budget of £106 million in 2019; its car was the slowest on the grid by far. Most drivers start young, racing in go-karts from the age of five or six and moving up through Formulas 4, 3 and 2 before, if they’re lucky, getting a seat in an F1 car. It can cost £50,000 a year to compete on the karting circuit and £500,000 to race ...”

“... on their sides. And the colour. Imagine the softest pencil you could find – I guess that would be a 10B. Now imagine really bearing down with it and blacking out two little circles. The persistence of these images is as interesting as the images themselves. In novels by women, novels I might call feminist, there are ...”

“... grow like Hydra’s heads,’ cries an exasperated Scot. Wales has always been a land obsessed by lineage and genealogy, blood-descent and complex, carefully nurtured family relations; its serpentine kinship structures seem destined – if not designed – to undermine linear English certainties. The major political upheaval of the 14th century had, after ...”

“... sobs, tears and kisses … gentlemen brave as lions, gentle as lambs’, fancied her husband-to-be a ‘white-plumed rider on a black horse’. He turned out to be dull as dishwater. Emma’s imagination was held hostage by the 19th-century bourgeois ideal of revelatory, eternal love ...”

“... In hell​ ,’ the American law teacher Grant Gilmore wrote, ‘there will be nothing but law, and due process will be meticulously observed.’ This has for a long time been the view of a neoliberal school of legal thought; but the argument of Jonathan Sumption’s 2019 Reith Lectures, delivered in May and June and now issued in book form, is more accommodating ...”

“... on 12 July, the anniversary of William of Orange’s victory at the Battle of the Boyne. Puzzled by what he sees, the man accosts a local:‘I say, what’s going on here?’‘It’s the Twalth!’‘I beg your pardon … The twelfth?’‘Ay, the Twalth.’‘I’m sorry: the twelfth what?’‘The Twalth of Julay.’‘I see, the twelfth of July. But what ...”

“... Darwin didn’t: a snorkel. Before the 20th century, a coral reef was not a place that could be easily visited. Indigenous people who lived on and around reefs could see them underwater, diving with open eyes or using goggles made from polished sea-turtle shell, but most arrivals could only squint from the surface. Beauty, even biology, was not usually ...”

“... Who​ invented English literature? English literature, that is, as a conceptual category defined by canon and tradition? The 18th century has provided most of the candidates. There were opinion formers like Joseph Addison, who airbrushed out Milton’s regicidal politics, or David Garrick, who turned Shakespeare from upstart crow into national bard; there were theoreticians of ‘original composition’ like Edward Young, who set a premium on the rejection of classical models; there were book-trade entrepreneurs whose huge poetry anthologies cashed in on the landmark case of Donaldson v ...”

“... your voice hoarse. Oh, we Who wanted to prepare the land for friendliness Could not ourselves be friendly‘Could not be friendly’ is a discreet but painful understatement, a too amiable hint at horrors. Dark times mean not only that terrible things happen to the world and to us but also that we have had a hand in the ...”