“... was at the end of Leahy Road in Sandymount. It is where, reputedly, on 16 June 1904, James Joyce took Nora Barnacle on their first date, when she slid her hand down inside his trousers to move his shirt ‘softly aside’. With hindsight, Joyce saw something in that moment (eyes closed, eyes open): a kind of crux in his life, the fact that his future had ...”

“... a dividing line between the fiscal responsibility of our party and the reckless promises of John McDonnell and Jeremy Corbyn?’ Four years ago in these pages I warned that the government’s plans to bring down the headline debt figure through asset sales, including the sale of part of the student loan book, would mean a loss of millions of pounds to ...”

“... throughout the second century AD, authors such as Achilles Tatius, Dictys of Crete, and Lollianus took up Phoenicia as the subject and the setting of their fictional works. Heliodorus famously plays with the word phoinix throughout his novel, using it in every possible sense: merchants from Tyre, the dark red colour of murex dye or blood, dates and palm ...”

“... material of her art. She published nothing until she was in her thirties and even then, though she took immense trouble over her ‘little books’, she was modestly dismissive of them. The year before her death in 1943, when she was world-famous, she wrote to a friend that really she had done nothing: ‘I have just made stories to please myself because I ...”

“... the tale of James James Morrison Morrison Weatherby George Dupree, who took great care of his mother, though he was only three. The mother, you will remember, disobeys James James’s order that she should not go down to the end of the town without consulting him. She never comes back. It is shrugged off very casually: King ...”

“... the world.’Erica is a twin whose sister played the piano fast and moved slowly: ‘The slowness took her away, drew her in like an abyss.’ Is Carrère’s slow book attempting a similar trick? He is learning to type on typing.com. His editor, who always wanted to read him ‘immediately’, has died. A writer who in the past always placed himself at the ...”

“... of his ‘philosophical heroes’ as Dewey, James (W.; certainly not H.), Peirce, J.L. Austin, John McDowell, Husserl (with reservations) and, of course, Wittgenstein. Disappointingly, however, neither Putnam nor anybody else in his direct realist pantheon is prepared actually to offer an account of how perception works. Rather, ‘in my opinion, “direct ...”

“... as to throw away invoices; he assembled all the papers, went to court in a libel action and took on the eminent Sergeant Shee, to such effect that the judge stopped the trial, awarding him costs and a retraction of the libel. Jones emerged with his character intact, but with his newspaper career near its end. Late in 1859 he went bankrupt, with debts of ...”

“... Purrrfect!’ That was last summer, and new brutalism in academia was taking on another meaning. I took my Californian friend inside, to get a feel of the hessian-clad walls; the cloth is a little frayed by now, but the décor still gave off aromas of patchouli, Nesquik, joss sticks, Players No. 6, beanbags, and this and that kind of grass. The University of ...”

“... West German economic miracle. The occupation is often remembered as the moment when young Germans took to jazz and, like Sollors, aped the casual manner of the American soldiers posted in their country, but it was primarily a time of hunger and misery, as the Germans burrowed into ruins, or joined crowds of ragged DPs trekking across the country. ‘We ...”

“... States has a right to dictate what happens in Cuba can be traced as far back as the presidency of John Quincy Adams, when conventional wisdom held that Spain’s dominion over Cuba would inevitably give way to the island’s incorporation into the United States. ‘It’s in the neighbourhood’s interest that Cuba be free,’ Bush said when he introduced the ...”

“... consequently, Labour should show ‘humility’ and return to Blairism under a different leader. John Rentoul recently wrote in the Independent that the Labour Party has moved ‘to the left faster than the speed of light’. The definition of ‘left’ here is one that few outside Blairite circles would recognise, but it’s still telling. The idea that ...”

“... work from which McKenna quotes with a certain relish. The arrest was a worrying moment for John Fiske, the American consul in Edinburgh, whose love letters to Boulton were already in the hands of the police and who was no doubt looking into diplomatic immunity. It was also a troubling time for Lord Arthur Pelham-Clinton, son of the Duke of ...”

“... Elsie, Strong recalls without irony, was ‘a better class of person’, the same evocative phrase John Osborne used, with heavy irony, as the title of his autobiography. Osborne was six years older than Strong and from a strikingly similar background about which he was equally unforgiving, as was another close contemporary, Joe Orton. The three make a ...”

“... sympathies (in spite of my official views generally) are against the coup’ – but he took no stand against the junta. With all the praise for A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water, there came a few catcalls. Too many epithets, too many magnificent landscapes. And what sort of footsore traveller was this, who spent so many nights ...”