“... Raymond Chandler writes in ‘The Simple Art of Murder’ (1950) that ‘the English may not always be the best writers in the world, but they are incomparably the best dull writers.’ He’s specifically referring to crime novelists – the likes of Dorothy L. Sayers, Ngaio Marsh, Margery Allingham, Agatha Christie – in an attempt to wrest the detective story away from the English suburbs and towards the grittier (and far more romantic) novels written by himself and Dashiell Hammett ...”

“... unforeseen, for situations other than the one the law-changer was trying to deal with. So one may turn out not to have made the legal change one was hoping to make. This means that, thanks to the rule of law, it is very hard for a government to get the law out of the way ad hoc so as to clear a quick and easy path to its policy objectives. Doesn’t that ...”

“... in pattern does not mean they must stand or fall together. They are about different things; one may be right and the other wrong. Modern evolutionary biology contains two main sets of theoretical ideas. One is the hypothesis of a pattern of common ancestry, roughly tree-shaped, linking all life on Earth. The other concerns the way change occurs within ...”

“... of telling a lie depend on what we are being asked and what the consequences of telling the truth may be. As Stuart Hampshire intimated in the LRB more than thirty years ago, the question for Williams was how far he was willing to go with the particular; willing, that is, to accept that to live in a fully human way is to accept the contingency of our ...”

“... were never any fights between us,’ Jashodaben told a reporter last year. ‘In three years, we may have been together for all of three months. There has been no communication from his end to this day.’ Jashodaben, now in her sixties, is a retired teacher who lives with her brothers in the town of Unjha in Gujarat and spends much of her time praying. She ...”

“... Cyber-warfare was now assumed to pose a greater threat to national security than terrorism. In May 2014, the attorney general, Eric Holder, announced that criminal charges had been laid against five Chinese military officials accused of hacking into US companies in order to gain trade secrets. In October 2014, as President Obama was preparing to make a ...”

“... if research breaks and parental leave cause delays. The junior doctor treating you in hospital may have more than ten years’ experience, across the different hospital departments, and it’s this general medical expertise that the government is relying on to enforce its ‘seven days a week’ NHS. Of course the NHS already operates 24 hours a day, seven ...”

“... defenders of the old faith faced either courageous death or self-disgust, and Wyatt’s explosion may have been political. Equally, trained up for war through the mock-war of jousting and tournament, the young men at court turned easily to private violence. In Holbein’s portrait Richard Southwell has a scar across the neck. The Earl of Surrey was sent to ...”

“... cousin to the Latin vaticinor (the Vatican is named from its site on the collis vaticanus, which may itself have got its name from the fact that seers and prophets used to congregate there). ‘Fate’ is similarly derived from fatus, the past participle of Latin fari, ‘to speak’. Prophecy is therefore performative, a speech act that does something in ...”

“... implacable murderous intent who have haunted the Western imaginary over the past decade – which may in part explain the recent zombie resurgence. In Theories of International Politics and Zombies, Daniel Drezner reproduces some graphs plotting the sharp rise in zombie activity since the turn of the millennium.† It so happens that the generally accepted ...”

“... he had another enthusiasm too, less commented on, and cheaper to pursue: the pulp novels of Karl May, set in the Wild West and featuring cowboys, mostly of German descent, like Old Shatterhand, whose name refers to the power of his punch, and Winnetou, a Native American who converts to Christianity. May became the centre ...”

“... suffered in later life from a disease that he called ‘rheumatic gout’, which Peters suspects may in fact have been Reiter’s syndrome, a kind of reactive arthritis often associated with sexually transmitted disease. In any case, he and Dickens became fast friends, more and more intimate as Dickens grew estranged from his wife. Travelling together to ...”

“... Politics’ is a strange word, and the particular nature of its strangeness may explain why so many people feel confused by or alienated from political processes. It can refer high-mindedly to ‘the political ideas, beliefs or commitments of a particular individual’. But it can also be more or less value-neutral – or indeed suggest a complete lack of principle – when it is used to mean ‘activities or policies associated with government ...”

“... he up and he jumped in the water-hole, Drowning himself by the coolibah tree, And his ghost may be heard as it sings by the billabong, Who’ll come a-waltzing Matilda with me? ‘Waltzing Matilda’, A.B. ‘Banjo’ Paterson (1895) Three weeks before the American presidential vote, the political right was victorious in the Australian federal ...”

“... du monde on dit “presser des questions”, en français on dit “torture”.’ Atrocities may have been widely discussed among left-wing intellectuals, but knowledge of them was not confined to habitués of the Deux Magots. Jean Lartéguy’s popular novels about the Parachute Regiment, which could be picked up at any station bookstall, were quite ...”