“... society.Since 2008, economists’ and politicians’ view of higher education has grown steadily more disapproving. In contrast to the boom years of the 1990s, when it seemed a virtuous circle might be established between generous public investment in universities and economic growth, the suspicion now is that individual academics aren’t sufficiently ...”

“... opinion that the judgment pertained strictly to abortion; but in a supporting opinion, Clarence Thomas suggested that the court ‘reconsider all of this court’s substantive due process precedents’, including contraception, same-sex relationships and same-sex marriage. The Dobbs decision would have been unimaginable without Trump, who appointed three ...”

“... pleasing serendipity: anthoi, logia, ‘a gathering of flowers’. The Elizabethans may have been more inventive, with their Handful of Pleasant Delights and Paradise of Dainty Devices, but an apologetic impulse remains apparent in the way they name miscellanies. How much has changed? We read The Golden Treasury or, as indicatively, The Rattle Bag. Our ...”

“... fixed shape. Even large octopuses – the largest species, the Giant Pacific, has an arm span of more than six metres and weighs a hundred pounds – can fit through an opening an inch wide, or about the size of its eye. This, combined with their considerable strength – a mature male Giant Pacific can lift thirty pounds with each of its 1600 suckers ...”

“... diplomatically and militarily outwitted by Philip II of France. In one view, John’s reign makes more sense as an ending of the cosmopolitan political settlement, sometimes called the ‘Angevin empire’, in which English kings also controlled territory in nearly half of France.Kings do hate to give up their claims, however. Well into the middle of the 13th ...”

“... ephemeral. Ammons listens to syllables as though he were diagnosing the workings of matter. ‘Sir Thomas Browne uses the word as “fictile vessels”, meaning clay,’ he wrote to a friend in 1954, ‘very interesting word; the first syllable hard, the second oozing over into a thin oilyness.’ This slippage from solid to liquid is translated into analogous ...”

“... An unredacted part of Cullather’s book records that the coup was thought to be both ‘more ambitious and more thoroughly successful’ than Iran 1953, about which the Iran operation chief officer found John Foster Dulles ‘almost alarmingly enthusiastic’. Guatemala 1954 went down in CIA lore as proof that ...”

“... first met Johnson in 1763, in the back parlour of a bookshop. It belonged to a friend of Johnson, Thomas Davies, who described ‘his aweful approach … somewhat in the manner of an actor in the part of Horatio, when he addresses Hamlet on the appearance of his father’s ghost, “Look, my Lord, it comes.”’ ‘Remember me’ was Boswell’s mandate from ...”

“... thought it unlikely that all men were created equal. His earliest compositions were conservative, more in line with the contrapuntal style of Brahms than the harmonic invention of Wagner. His first string quartet, performed by the Wiener Tonkünstlerverein thanks to Zemlinsky, who was on the committee, was well received: one influential critic, excited by his ...”

“... to trashing Labour. Three days later it was forced to admit that voters were, apparently, even more stupid than feared: Corbyn ‘offered some of the biggest electoral bribes in history, making lavish promises of non-existent cash to pensioners, the public sector and those on the minimum wage. And he bribed the gullible young by pledging to scrap tuition ...”

“... trouble is,’ Willard adds, ‘I had been back there, and I knew it just didn’t exist any more.’ The phrase picks up old slogans from Thomas Wolfe (‘You can’t go home again’) and Scott Fitzgerald (‘“Can’t repeat the past?” he cried, incredulously. “Why, of course you can”’), but it also adds ...”

“... Dominicans who introduced him to Catholic social teaching and the Aristotle-inspired theology of Thomas Aquinas, and joined a local cell of the Communist Party, where he learned about Marx, Engels and the contradictions of capitalism. He was dazzled by the intellectual treasures spread before him, but suspected he could not have them all. ‘One thing on ...”

“... As we close in on the centenary of Basil Bunting’s birth at Scotswood-on-Tyne in 1900 it looks more and more as if this long poem written late in his life is not simply the best thing that Bunting had done but among the very best poems anyone has done this century. The Poet as Spy is the first full-length biography of ...”

“... MacArthur has handed out some $3 billion (at current values) to 588 American geniuses. Many times more than the total distributed by the Arts Council, British Academy and Leverhulme Foundation combined. The annual list is as eagerly awaited as the Nobel Prizes, the National Book Awards or (in the academic community, at least) the Oscars. Decisions are made by ...”

“... a crass promotion for the Armani empire? (‘Life is promotion,’ the Guggenheim’s director, Thomas Krens, has cheerfully noted.) Arranged by colour and genre rather than chronologically, the four hundred garments cover the phases and influences of Armani’s career over the past twenty-five years, emphasising androgyny, minimalism, cinema, sensuality ...”