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“... revealing contradiction in the way bearness has been marketed in Western consumer cultures. Bears, we have been led to believe, are super-cuddly – right up until the moment when they rip your throat out.For most people, the cuddles came first, in the guise of a four-legged comfort blanket with button eyes, satellite-dish ears and a blob of black velvet for a ...”

“... from whatisthematrix.warnerbros.com, is awesome. The premise of the trilogy is that reality as we know it is a computer-generated illusion: our bodies are all lying in amniotic tanks, batteries for the machines that actually rule the world; our minds plugged into the matrix to keep us alive (no, the science doesn’t withstand much scrutiny). In the story ...”

“... professionals, perhaps seen instead as an indictment of their competence or an act of disloyalty. We go to our deaths asymptotically, never getting there because ‘we’ and ‘there’ can’t exist at the same moment, even in the case of those who have chosen to die, like the painter Keith Vaughan in 1977, who continued ...”

“... used to say. The new version is ‘Zimbabwe is kenge,’ which means roughly the same thing. David Caute’s portrait of white mores is savage, but like so many visitors before and after him, he was fascinated – seduced – by Rhodesia. It was, and is, a country which captivates even as it appals, and it has always been so much easier to explain the ...”

“... What, for instance, happened to Saddam’s dreaded Republican Guard, all eighty thousand of them? We heard that they ‘melted away’, that their units were ‘severely degraded’ by allied air strikes. Yet few if any journalists met any members of the Republican Guard, saw them in action, saw them get killed, saw them get bombed, or saw them sneak away ...”

“... deal that needed explaining. Some, like the Italian interviewer, have dwelt on the appeal of the David-and-Goliath conflict between the Gauls and the Roman superpower. Or, at least, David and Goliath with a twist: Astérix doesn’t beat brute force by superior cunning and intelligence – he does it thanks to his ...”

“... all has centred on his role as catalyst of the Revolution. Was his impertinent barber the Sweeney Todd of the Ancien Régime, the true begetter of the guillotine? ‘Figaro killed off the nobility,’ remarked Danton, while Napoleon saw in Le Mariage ‘the Revolution in action’ and would have done what Louis XVI did not dare to: locked him up for ...”

“... exactly what it says on the spine of the book, offering a number of versions of the life of Ursula Todd, born in 1910. These lives aren’t exactly alternatives: it’s unclear what happens to the (very slightly) variant worlds when she dies in them, but then how would this information be conveyed? It’s a religious problem more than one of narrative ...”

“... better. ‘So feeling comes in aid/Of feeling, and diversity of strength/Attends us, if but once we have been strong.’ If Lady Sophia Sternheim ever uttered such a sentiment, she would make the emphasis fall on aid and assume that the feelings belonged to neighbourly friends in the habit of giving comfort. ‘I cannot,’ she writes, ‘prostitute the ...”

“... Were​ they art, or publicity? Can we settle on ‘magic’? Humphrey Bogart was born on Christmas Day, 1899. Lauren Bacall died on 12 August 2014. So the span of William Mann’s well-researched dual biography is some 115 years. But a case can be made that the ‘greatest love affair’ promised by Mann amounted to no more than 216 minutes in the busy years of the mid-1940s ...”

“... an alarming instability starts to make itself felt. One of the most secure ideas, apparently, that we have about the recent past, which enters even very informal discourse on countless occasions, looks dubious. Less disruption would be involved if there survived a categorical link, of whatever sort, between the Victorians and sex: if ‘Victorian’ continued ...”

“... After the attacks of 11 September 2001, Cheney assembled a crack team of White House lawyers, David Addington, Timothy Flanigan and Alberto Gonzales, with support from John Yoo at the Justice Department, who set about granting the president as many extraordinary powers as Cheney thought he needed. First up was intercepting, without a ...”

“... Lambert is a former college lecturer who got done for messing about with a clever student. When we meet him he has an apartment in New York and a handsome girlfriend, but no money, and he is pinning all his hopes on a screenplay he has been writing for ages. The girlfriend finishes with him just as his parents arrive for lunch, so Chip is left with nothing ...”

“... fulfilled and terminated. That cured me for good. So now I admire climbing from a distance. As David Craig effectively demonstrates in Native Stones, however, it is an activity best understood from close up. Much of its delight and terror is almost microscopic in source. Non-climbers may associate the sport with acrophobic spaces, alp on alp arising, but ...”

“... Unionists as parochial know-nothings. Revisionist historians, most prominently Ian McBride and David Livingstone, have demonstrated that the history of Ulster Presbyterianism from the 18th century is characterised by intellectual richness, an openness to science, a commitment to progress and a taste for theological heterodoxy, notwithstanding backwoods ...”