“... either end of an increasingly blurred spectrum. The lengthy reports gathered in The Moon by Whale Light (‘and Other Adventures among Bats, Penguins, Crocodilians and Whales’) were written for the New Yorker, on which Ackerman has served as a staff writer on animal life. The very niche is new, and nature-writers today have a glamour quite foreign to their ...”

“... size in the normal run of things? These are the formulae, almost exactly, that were reached for by Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro in their earliest denial mode (from which Bolsonaro remains unbudged). To Camus, such thinking shouldn’t be dismissed as the ranting of dangerous fools, even when it is that. He is interested in how human subjects deal with ...”

“... The reader is enabled, rather, to see something like the minute gradations of colour in light; so that it is genuinely hard to say with truth that Coleridge is the master of three or four or five poems, and of no others. But light does sometimes achieve full day. Any good reader will recognise that there is a ...”

“... to attack the wrong ex-hippie for crimes against their son, imagines a beam of forgiveness-seeking light shooting out of her forehead,charged with the notion I am so sorry, that travelled across town and crossed the river and roamed through the woods until it found the two guys and, having briefly paused above them because they looked so damned ...”

“... They regarded the commandment ‘Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s wife’ as a caution light rather than a stop sign, coveting one another’s spouses like crazy. Updike would describe himself as a mini-Mailer, a stag among the herd of housewife does. For a time, the shifting combinations of partners produced quite a kaleidoscope. You couldn’t ...”

“... back to these paddocks in my dreams. I can’t tell why, but I feel it in my bones; it’s the light, the smell, the extraordinary sense of space and all the little things as well. The dust and scuttle of the sheep when two or three are gathered together, it’s really beastly, but I shall smell it and hear it till I die.’Australia haunts his first ...”

“... the people he writes about, usually men who dress, as Woodward does, in dark suits, plain ties and light blue shirts, the better to be observed on TV – they never reveal much of themselves.What is known about Woodward? He’s a former navy man, who wrote several hundred articles on Watergate for the Washington Post with his colleague Carl Bernstein. The two ...”

“... over the centuries has challenged common notions of the intelligible: the Earth moves; white light is compound; there are such things as atoms. But modern physics is special in this respect: not only does it confront us with a radical mismatch between the way things seem and the way things are; it stages a conflict between everyday and scientific ideas ...”

“... bars, slashing his way through video games and death-metal lyrics, encountering a time-travelling Donald Duck. Even stranger, as a figure embraced by both the far right and the left, El Cid has also come to stand as an emblem of democracy and pluralism. Berend is writing with deicidal intent: once the myth has been fully exposed to the ...”

“... of agrarian protest is continued in two new contributions to the lively debate on the Land League. Donald Jorden joins in a key issue of that debate – the nature and limitations of the class alliance involved in what is another local study (despite its title), of Mayo. His economic/demographic analysis of the county in core-periphery terms is impressive, as ...”

“... which to receive Anthony Blunt. The new prefatory statement is interesting in itself, and throws light on the already existing material. Rebecca West collects traitors. Through four decades she has pinned down a startlingly large number of them. The genus has several species: scientific traitor, diplomatic traitor and so on. West is reminded of the course of ...”

“... But he never shows why such claims are necessary for Foucault’s specific projects. Even Donald Davidson, on whose views Norris relies extensively in arguing against relativism, insists that we cannot recognise a conceptual framework or tradition unless we are in broad agreement with most of its elements. Davidson’s view, therefore, explicitly ...”

“... spoke too of a mistake – his own, which is at least some advance on Mosley’s disembarrassment. Donald Davie has spoken for Pound: ‘To take only the most blatant and damaging of the charges, his anti-Semitism, should we not respect him for admitting, however belatedly, “the worst mistake I made was that stupid, suburban prejudice of anti-Semitism”? It ...”

“... 19th-century administrations actually operated. The 1868-74 Cabinet emerges in a rather different light from that in which it has traditionally been seen by historians. As Dr Matthew points out in his perceptive introduction to the two volumes, it had more in common with the style of the 18th century than the 20th century. We may in retrospect regard 1868 as ...”

“... documents in the fireplaces; French civilians wandered around looking for goods and paper to light their own fires. The ‘countless agencies normally attached to a regular T-Force’ had, he said, ‘more or less gone wild’. Each of them ‘bagged material for itself in the “first come, first served” manner … As a result, most of the targets ...”