“... as it is in a more prosaic sense: that is, by not really changing anything. Philosophers may talk about justice or rights, but they don’t often try to reshape the world according to their ideals. Maybe that’s for the best. Philosophers have a tendency to slip from sense into seeming absurdity: a defence of abortion ends up defending ...”

“... work. The contract – agreed without any competitive tendering – was signed in early May but, unusually, backdated to 17 March, two days before Lee Cain’s Zoom call. Paul Stephenson’s public relations firm, Hanbury Strategy, was given a series of contracts. Campaigners launched a legal action, accusing the Cabinet Office of apparent bias and ...”

“... That has such people in’t! Prospero:         ’Tis new to thee. Prospero’s words may or may not be an aside. Immediately after his remark, the other parent and the other child on stage, Alonso and Ferdinand, have 14 lines of dialogue before Prospero speaks to them; Miranda has no more to say in the play. If ...”

“... pages, of which only the first 93 have previously been printed. Lawrence wrote the book between May 1920, when he had just finished The Lost Girl, and some time in 1921. He gave up working on Mr Noon in order to dash off the travel book Sea and Sardinia, and was at the same time writing Aaron’s Rod. He had trouble finishing both the novels: Aaron’s Rod ...”

“... will not wish to appear as the aggressor, and will lie in wait for a suitable provocation. It may even be very cautious in its initial reaction. The Israeli response to provocation need not be an immediate general attack. Israel can respond with a relatively limited action, and wait for the counter-reaction of the other side. Should the terrorist reaction ...”

“... remains as a symbol that complete disagreement with the Soviet Union has never been reached and may not be possible. The only occasion on which the Soviet Union seems seriously to have considered releasing him was in 1974 when the Bishop of Berlin suggested that he be replaced by an anti-Fascist museum designed and operated by the same four powers who run ...”

“... as an inspiration; defensively denounced, but perhaps more important, was Dylan Thomas. Thomas may have looked like an ‘ugly puffy fatso’ when he visited Cambridge during Redgrove’s student days, but he ‘kept visionary poetry alive for me and kept me alive too’. Redgrove’s finest early collection of poems, The Force (1966), has a title surely ...”

“... was faking messages from missing British liaison officers to keep up morale at home. SOE personnel may not have perfected their skills in duplicity – ‘love and kisses’ – but they were giving it their best shot. Shortly, secret services on both sides of the Iron Curtain would hone the arts of lying. Thompson died in early June, but it wasn’t until 21 ...”

“... once the balloon went up,’ he began to take preventative measures with an anti-tank rifle (they may have been the only shots Watt fired ‘in action’). The troops under his command objected to such summary treatment being meted out to the zoo’s two zebras; they were released and followed the retreating soldiers ‘at a wary distance’. One of the ...”

“... in control of his household, and who is talking to his wife, rather than to a mother who may be about to remarry – shows something significant about the psychological and poetic methods of The Odyssey, as well as demonstrating how difficult it is to be sure about what is going on in the poem. A sneeze or a quotation from The Iliad can convey power ...”

“... of welcome, in which a host invites you in with greetings, smiles and open arms. The gestures may be a sincere expression of friendship, but they are also, unavoidably, a sly assertion of privilege: this is my place, they say, and even if I tell you to ‘make yourself at home,’ you must remember that you are here on my sufferance. The double-edged ...”

“... woollen coat,’ he writes, ‘which covers the day labourer, as coarse and rough as it may appear, is the produce of the joint labour of a great multitude of workmen.’ He listed the shepherds, wool sorters, carders, dyers, spinners, weavers, fullers and dressers who ‘must all join their different arts in order to complete even this homely ...”

“... from the near town ... And yet this is the poet who quotes with solemn approval: Beauty it may be is the meet of lines, Or careful-spacèd sequences of sound. Well, to be sure: but what happens to ‘the meet of lines’ at ‘wheelbarrow/paths’, and ‘but/out’ and ‘were/barred’? Grigson’s precepts are often admirable, but they are ...”

“... it in that dawn to be reading Tel Quel and watching the signs that led up to les événements of May ’68. Sollers was among the chief theorists of that ‘moment’, along with Barthes and Derrida. It is not hard to see the connection between these essays and a text like Barthes’s S/Z, where the scientistic dream of a structuralist ‘method’ is ...”

“... since the universe cooled enough to give them free passage. In this neck of the cosmic woods, life may not be all that rare. Rees estimates that even our own galaxy carries millions of Earth-like planets. Admittedly, failure to detect extraterrestrials suggests that most of the planets are ‘Earth-like’ only in offering suitable environments, not in ...”