“... earlier used to devour a takeaway M&S red onion and feta salad – this is pure speculation, she may’ve just used a stray screwdriver or a handy Swiss army knife, or the salad may actually have been tuna-based) – then returns to the ailing postbox and … The tuna-based salad, which renders the speaker insane, is pure ...”

“... Today if ‘thingness’ matters, it is that of the screen. The picture snapped with a mobile may be charged with immediacy, but it lacks the power to reflect on the world it so eagerly, even promiscuously records. Or is it that the world ‘out there’ has somehow become invisible, little more than a background to the self? Salt and Silver catalyses ...”

“... and the book’s ending gives further evidence of this courage, in contrast with what there may be in her of the supine, accident-prone and excitable, a contrast which may supply the clearest instance of her duality. As a cradle Catholic still affected by the traditions of her community, she has seen the point of ...”

“... a fog of grappa and obsession, Lynch sets about befriending ugly Anna, while suspecting that she may be in cahoots with her mother, the blonde contessa, and possibly also with the rival art historian. In a leather trunk covered with dust, concealed in a hidden room in Mawle House (don’t groan: the art-hunt novel is a sub-species of Gothic, in which the ...”

“... on the inventory of that institution – is covered, and the state hoping to recover its property may have to pay compensation. These strict requirements contrast strongly with the sweeping rhetoric of the rest of the convention. As Patrick O’Keefe has shown, this formulation was insisted on by the US delegation, which refused to sign unless it was drafted ...”

“... and whose literary ambitions have been trivialised. First, she insists, ‘Austen’s short life may have been lived in relative privacy, but her novels show her to be a citizen, and certainly a spectator, of a far wider world.’ Second, and more controversially, she argues that ‘the true subject of serious fiction is not “current events”, ongoing ...”

“... of 1922. Conley wonders if there was some pretence here. She puts it better: ‘While he may have occasionally simulated autohypnosis in order to push himself into a "real” second state, he found simulated and real automatic "dreams” equally productive of poetic material.’ This casts a whole other (and, from my perhaps perverse point of ...”

“... that really is a big opening up of access to many millions of the ‘digitally excluded’. It may sound like a luxury, rich-world problem, but in fact it is the poor and old who at the moment suffer most if they can’t access the net, especially as more and more government services go online.All the big tech companies are working on voice, but the first ...”

“... though in a grisly illustration of the importance of freedom of choice in America, prisoners may still opt for the chair.) With typical fridge brilliance, Kinney claims it’s precisely our ignorance of the historical role of hooding that prevents people from protesting against modern day executions: ‘It concentrates all accountability in the ...”

“... 413. Looking inland from the banks of its rivers, the Naver or the Helmsdale, you feel they may well be flowing from some distant source in Poland or Siberia. Around you mountains raise up their grey-blue massifs, habitats of red deer and golden eagle, grouse and ptarmigan. Between these heights lie long straths and glens, well-watered and greenly ...”

“... the proposed deal had been rejected, and another 14 days of strikes, timed for the exam season in May and June, had been announced. Later that day, Sally Hunt, who’d spoken in favour of the deal, reaffirmed that the union’s strength lay in its membership. At the UEA meeting I attended, everyone had been muttering about cancelling their memberships if the ...”

“... the passage of the 1973 HMO Act: ‘The less care they give them the more money they make.’ In May 2016 Jeremy Hunt, then health minister, admitted at a Commons Health Committee hearing that Kaiser was a model for his planned NHS reforms. When a trial of ACOs was announced in the UK in 2017, it caused an outcry from campaigners and NHS England quickly ...”

“... and the subject of the country’s ‘illegals’ played a prominent part in the campaign for the May 2019 elections, in which the BJP won nearly two-thirds of seats in parliament. Addressing crowds in West Bengal in April, the home minister, Amit Shah, pledged that a BJP government would ‘pick up infiltrators one by one and throw them into the Bay of ...”

“... has it that the announcement was removed only twenty minutes before the issue went to press.That may be as close to death as the TLS has ever come, but it has continued to have its ups and downs. Circulation rose through the 1920s to 30,000, then dropped sharply, down to 23,000 by 1934, and Richmond despaired of arresting the decline: ‘Even among my own ...”

“... been under my management.’ Himmelfarb’s studies of Darwin, Disraeli, Bentham and Blackstone may be read primarily as essays in historical revisionism: though all have implications for wider moral theory, it would be possible to view them as merely academic. A less clinical and more contentious note is struck by the essays in which Himmelfarb deals with ...”