“... straitjacket of filth.’ Or David’s wife, far from celebrating the possibility that her husband may have a second chance at a cancer cure, bitterly thinks: ‘No, it will be a second agony.’ These post-anomaly chapters are both the least ‘experimental’, employing traditional psychological-realist plotting and characterisation to elicit genuine ...”

“... d’être is or was being of the centre, came close to being eliminated at the general election in May, and it’s fantasy to believe that the Conservative Party now occupies that position. Those who argue that Labour should move to the centre, the party’s perpetual ‘modernisers’, are in practice suggesting that Labour should adopt policies wholly ...”

“... the court has overfilled its list, and so they have to return months later, when the same thing may happen again. Some give up, and defendants go free by default. The government would rather waste everyone’s time than pay to keep enough courts open to hear cases without unreasonable delays. The House of Commons Justice Committee reported that 55 per cent ...”

“... more obviously symbols of affluence than others. Randolph Hearst’s Neptune pool at San Simeon may be the most opulent pool ever constructed, with its elaborately tiled floor and surrounding statues, colonnades and classical façades. The second most opulent pool may be the indoor ‘Roman’ pool Hearst built at his ...”

“... probably a result of previous underreporting – and the Mayor of Beijing had been sacked. This may well have been the first time since the Revolution that anyone really senior had lost their job for incompetence, rather than because of political in-fighting. Everybody on the train back to the North-East had their home address and phone number taken by the ...”

“... after such a long journey. It is true Afrikaner hospitality and, however odious my escort here may be, they are deeply embedded in this culture and they can’t say no to its hospitality. Besides, however pressing it may be to get me to Durban Central, they’ve had only one smallish meat pie each for their police ...”

“... Anonymous city, handheld camera, actors who scarcely seem to be acting: we may think we know where we are, more or less. This is surely the New Wave by way of Neo-Realism, early Truffaut chasing late Rossellini. Didn’t we get over this? How could a film in this vein, namely L’Enfant, written and directed by Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne, win the Palme d’Or at Cannes last year? To say nothing of the same prize won by their film Rosetta, a venture in just the same vein, in 1999 ...”

“... said it was a rationale for getting jobs for your friends and excluding your enemies. True as this may be of our present regime, it was unfair to him and had been put to him under torture, which he sympathetically said he could not bear. But sympathy here may not be our last emotion: Savonarola turned out to be a ...”

“... and little considered constitutional implications – makes it much harder to know what may happen if there is no clear winner. Opinions about how easy it would be to engineer an election before the five years are up vary from no problem to no way (the truth is probably somewhere in between). What’s more, previous nail-biters were straight two-way ...”

“... and functions); they are often (perhaps always) conscious; and they are often intensional. (You may wonder why philosophers sometimes spell ‘intentional’ with a t and sometimes with an s; and why Deacon feels compelled to compound the homonymity with the neologistic ‘ententional’. But it is better not to ask.) Deacon’s book is about the way ...”

“... about legal processes framed at a level of generality large enough to embrace all member states may well be unworkable in some of them. The first of these difficulties has historically been tackled by the use of the margin of appreciation, a literal rendering, meaningless in English, of the French marge d’appréciation, which means margin of judgment. It ...”

“... When the queen came to Ireland in May 2011 a number of the great, good and merely deserving were locked in the 1937 reading room of Trinity College Dublin for two hours without their mobile phones, before being allowed into the beautiful Long Room of the Old Library to await her arrival. The ratio of men to women was about the same as you find at the front of the plane – five to one perhaps, of suit to skirt – and the conversation veered towards the kind of disaster that happens when Wives Are Not Invited ...”

“... human sentiment’. The ratio of reverie to dramatic incident will be unusually high, though there may well be a sudden flurry of events near the end. In The Blue Guitar our man is Oliver Orme. He ‘used to be a painter’ but he gave it up. (In a taste of strained puns to come, he says: ‘Ha! The word I wrote down first, instead of painter, was ...”

“... defendants start taking the stand; but since that isn’t expected to happen until the summer they may well – who knows? – be on holiday by then. But the particular reason this trial hasn’t been worth reporting is that all the main elements of the prosecution’s case were widely known long before it began, were known, in fact, before the suspects were ...”

“... curious details, bits of the real but not part of any attempt at realism, pieces of a puzzle that may not even exist. Feet, legs, hands, sand, straw, mud, laceless old shoes; dulled or hallucinating faces staring past the camera at some lost version of infinity; countless shots of the backs of persons walking away from us, or figures whose heads are out of ...”