“... which are many, belong not to real life but to acted and filmed performance. The performance may be taken to represent life, but, here as in Cassavetes’s subsequent films, it is closer to a kind of allegory, a symbolic transposition of life into the realm of actors acting, than to a lifelike representation. Rather than there being any imitation of ...”

“... eyes and listen to the music (remarkable by any standards) but not to read the supertitles. That may be the best advice when all is said and done, but it wouldn’t have pleased Wagner. His commitment to opera as drama was vehement and frequently announced. (In his essays, Wagner was the kind of writer who never says anything once.) And, for better or ...”

“... Palestine, a third of Palestine’s Arabs had been evicted before the Arab states invaded in May 1948. Abba Eban, Israel’s representative at the UN, nonetheless told the General Assembly in 1957 that ‘the responsibility of the Arab governments is threefold. Theirs is the initiative for its creation. Theirs is the onus for its endurance. Above all ...”

“... as on judges who have to decide upcoming cases in the knowledge of the journalistic abuse that may await them if they decide one way rather than the other. The European Convention on Human Rights, with its qualified guarantee of free expression, makes contempt of court a far less intimidating weapon than it once was; but it is just conceivable that the ...”

“... out during the past winter 107 times! When I come home you will think me a sad barbarian – I may not even, just at first, appreciate your fine points. The style of that is enough to suggest the kind of talk he did like when he could find it – not everyone’s idea of the natural. The ‘best talker, in a certain way’, that he had met in England was ...”

“... talks with former law clerks about the Justices and with the Justices about each other. The book may have permanently changed the relationship between the clerks and the Justices. These clerks are outstanding recent graduates of prominent law schools who are selected to serve as assistants to Supreme Court Justices for a year. The Justices, by ...”

“... prefaces Herbert’s Remains (1652). Johnson must have read Izaak Walton’s Life of Herbert, and may have quoted from it in his 28th Rambler, although he does not seem to have used this particular life in his quotations from Walton in the Dictionary. The Dictionary tells an entirely different story. Here Johnson quotes no less than 120 times from ...”

“... the instinctual and the imaginative life; in its ‘lower’, and perhaps commoner, forms, there may be little more than abnormal movements and impulsivity, though even here there is an element of strangeness. It was well recognised and extensively reported in the closing years of the last century, for these were years of a spacious neurology which did not ...”

“... contemporary audience. Merer’s text is more like a timesheet or a ship’s log than a memoir. He may have felt wonder, but was hardly compelled to write it down.Merer and his team loaded their boat with limestone blocks at one of the two quarries at Tura. They sailed north to She Khufu (Lake of Khufu), before proceeding to Akhet Khufu (Horizon of Khufu), the ...”

“... of rich and conservative American Catholics who wish to make themselves heard. Trump and Vance may publicly welcome him now, but the warmth will not last.In the week before Francis died, there had been concern in the Vatican about the impending visit of Vance, who had converted to Catholicism in 2019. In an encounter with Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval ...”

“... it isn’t clear that the novels are anything like as transgressive as their provocations may make them seem. Debré’s narrator doesn’t reflect much on her gender. If she were younger (like Debré, she comes out later in life, in her mid-forties), or living elsewhere, she might have explored the possibilities afforded by a non-binary ...”

“... The 2006 National Security Strategy celebrated success in Iraq, before declaring that the US ‘may face no greater challenge from a single country than from Iran’. The authors charged the Iranian government with sponsoring terrorism, threatening Israel, thwarting peace in the Middle East and ‘disrupting democracy in Iraq’. In the event, the US was ...”

“... does not pretend to see the whole period afresh. Indeed, in some respects there are, if one may so put it, fewer surprises than expected. Some of the most perceptive recent work (Tyacke, Collinson and Lamont on religion; Hirst on the electorate; Russell on the evolution of Pym’s character and Morrill on Pym’s relations with backwoods MPs; Peter ...”

“... Dear Britain, Merry Christmas! If I may Presume on your attention for the space Of one broadsheet, I’d simply like to say How pleased I am to see your homely face Perked up and looking forward to the day When even the downcast are kissed by grace – The day a perfect birth is celebrated And we who are imperfect feel elated ...”

“... the prejudice of which is precisely to value structures at the expense of substances, and which may therefore overestimate their explanatory value. Indeed, the question is not so much to know whether there is or is not a system of relations in a particular object of research, since such systems are everywhere, but to determine the relative importance of ...”