“... diagnosis that did nothing to effect a cure’. His sessions with four or five different analysts may not have helped him much, but they certainly generated a number of good poems, such as ‘The psychiatrist’s song’, ‘The psychiatrist speaks’ and ‘The psycho-analyst’; in the last of these the analyst is figured as embodying, like advertising, an ...”

“... only in the final painting is a door indicated; otherwise, there seems no means of escape. There may be pictures on the wall, but not of the sort that offers any view outwards; darkly unreadable, they return us to the intense clusters of men. Occasionally, a slight relief comes in the form of flowers, or fruit, or a carafe of wine, and there is a red ...”

“... in a series of poems in which the reader finds certain emotions being dissected, emotions she may feel while reading. ‘An Elliptical Stylus’ starts as a painful memory of his dad’s attempt to buy an expensive needle ‘for our ancient, beat-up Philips turntable’, which made the salesman splutter at their pretension: ‘still smirking, he sent us ...”

“... at a New York college who believes he is being framed for sex crimes against his students, may also have encouraged her to get hold of the wrong end of the stick: Lasdun was known to be fascinated by the sex and power dynamics of pupil-teacher relationships, and Nasreen had read the book ‘closely’. But her moments of lucidity became less ...”

“... to accuse its creator of shallowness. The facility for which Sargent would later become famous may have been evident in the speed with which he painted this picture (approximately seven feet square, it seems to have been completed in six weeks), but there is nothing facile or slick about the image itself, which is more likely to unsettle viewers than it is ...”

“... found as early as Dante), or even a set of seven couplets. Within each of these variations there may be further variations: do the quatrains hide a couplet within them (abba) or do they make up a couplet of rhymes (abab)? Should ‘a’ and ‘b’ rhymes dominate the octave, or can ‘c’ and ‘d’ jostle their way in too? The sonnet is a toolkit for ...”

“... having with their children. But I don’t think Davis’s great importance comes from the way she may or may not be talking about Lydia Davis. Writers tend to be either narcissists or voyeurs (though of course one can be both), and Davis is much more interested in other people than she is in herself. Even when she is ...”

“... 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 ...”