“... processes and activities through which, as embodied creatures, we, like other organisms, interact more or less effectively with our continuously changing environments, thereby ourselves changing more or less continuously’. About knowledge she says: What we come to call the truth or validity of some statement ...”

“... It looks​ , for now, more than 11 weeks after the inconclusive general election, as though Italy is about to have a new government. On Friday, 18 May, the Movimento 5 Stelle and the Lega Nord published the text of a coalition agreement, signed by their respective leaders, Luigi Di Maio and Matteo Salvini, and overwhelmingly approved by the members of both parties ...”

“... The​ Biltmore Hotel in Coral Gables, Florida is enormous. So is its pool, which you could say is more of a lake. When Madonna stayed there in the early 1990s, she apparently insisted on having the pool to herself, less for the swimming perhaps, and more because as a material goddess she could ...”

“... a transparent liquid, first viscous and sluggish, like a jelly of meaning, then ever thinner and more mobile, flowing faster and faster until it reached me at the speed of thinking and I could not entirely distinguish the suggestions it was making from my own thoughts. I had undergone the acceleration into the written word that you also experience as a ...”

“... to break up with her because he was in love in Rianna, she assumed he was joking. It took several more texts to convince her he wasn’t. Once she was convinced, however, ‘That was it. I haven’t talked to him since.’ It was the texting as much as the fancying of Rianna that she couldn’t forgive him. By sending a serious message using a medium they’d ...”

“... of the church clerks whom they seemed to disdain. Professor Barlow’s sterling new biography of Thomas Becket shows us a man whose origins, like William’s, were not of the highest: his father ‘may have been in textiles’. Like William, Thomas owed his rise, not to inheritance, but to his being sent to the household ...”

“... La Rochefoucauld Don Paterson and I were crossing the Wolfe Tone Bridge in Galway contemplating Thomas Crapper. This was at early o’clock in the morning on our way back from an awful curry at the only Indian restaurant open in Galway in the wee hours. The night was mild, and our thoughts drifted towards talk of Crapper as the air behind us burned with the ...”

“... in terms of material substrates, it’s been asked ‘What is it like to be a bat?’ – though Thomas Nagel’s famous essay of 1974 wasn’t really about the consciousness or sensory world of bats but about the consciousness and sensibilities of reductionist philosophers. (Nagel’s answer: we don’t know, and we certainly aren’t on the way to knowing ...”

“... conflict; but in the context of Japanese Buddhism they have a different dimension. What is more, the resistance of the Japanese medical profession to the use of the Pill means that abortion is for many Japanese women the ordinary means of birth control. This suits not only the doctors who perform the operation, but also the Buddhist clergy, who offer ...”

“... to sense shame, according to Freud and Lacan, is to be human, is Kafka’s narrator paradoxically more humanlike than the dogs mimicking humans?’ Furthermore, ‘observing the disgrace of another can cause shame in oneself: hence the narrator’s bodily affect of shame when confronted with the dancing dogs is to make himself smaller and to ...”

“... has some things in common with right-wing demagogues of the past, but Snyder neglects the next, more difficult step: explaining how Trump, and the context in which he arose, is different. The new president did not come to power thanks to the collapse of a liberal Weimar-like regime, but rather after a quarter of a century of domestic liberal triumph and ...”

“... and nourished with intellectual fodder. ‘Those who wish to revive the West,’ concludes Mr Thomas, ‘should recognise that one of the benefits of a study of history is that it is always possible to reverse, as Plato put it, an apparently fatal tendency towards decay, however late the hour …’ The weight of our planet’s unfinished history ...”

“... take their meaning from their endings. And we know that our deaths will be an end to it all: no more weekends, no more taxes, no more history, mothers, seconds and hours.A novel is a place where time can go slowly, leap forward, be reversed and repeat. In ‘Christmas Every Day’, a ...”

“... to make their own lives easier, at the cost, no doubt, of making the lives of certain authors more exasperating. They are dangerous terms because they tempt us to lump writers like Muriel Spark and Alice Thomas Ellis together, especially when there are other alluring points of comparison, such as a characteristic tone ...”

“... was increasingly recognised as a challenging alternative to the traditions of the West. An even more sensitive frontier is explored in Reich-Ranicki’s study of the role of Jews in German literature, Uber Ruhestörer (1973). In this short collection of lectures and reviews, Jewish writers from Heine to Jurek Becker are assigned the function of ...”