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“... them from talking about ‘the moral landscape’, fMRI studies aren’t taken very seriously. As David Eagleman writes in his recent book Incognito, ‘imaging methods make use of highly processed blood-flow signals, which cover tens of cubic millimetres of brain tissue. In a single cubic millimetre of brain tissue, there are some one hundred million ...”

“... the capacious context of such postwar avant-garde novelists as Thomas Bernhard, José Saramago and David Foster Wallace, only to acknowledge that, despite a shared affinity for ‘very long, breathing, unstopped sentences’, Krasznahorkai was ‘perhaps the strangest’ of them. The writer is ‘peculiar’; his work is ‘strange and beautiful’, with ...”

“... if the value is purely personal to the owner, an amount agreed between owner and finder. It is a nice question how this stipulation would apply to my passport. Colin Thubron’s wonderful book In Siberia (1999) describes the author’s visit to a village on the river Yenisei in the far north inhabited largely by one of the native peoples of Siberia, the ...”

“... always receiving a reassuring reply: ‘Ten miles, my lord,’ or ‘fifteen miles.’ One of the nice things about Byron was his lack of self-assurance. Trelawney, who sneered behind his back at the club foot, claimed always to let himself be beaten in their races, and Byron himself wrote to a friend that he would far rather swim the Hellespont again than ...”

“... still deny his comedy, which was often self-deprecating. John Carey, who wants all writers to be nice (ideally, as decent as Arnold Bennett), wrote a book about the nastiness of various modern writers called The Intellectuals and the Masses. In it Lawrence is scolded for his ‘fascism’, his ecstasies of annihilation. Carey plucks a sentence from a letter ...”

“... hacking at the News of the World collapsed. On 20 June, a few months after Coulson resigned as David Cameron’s director of communications, News International handed detectives emails between Coulson and the News of the World’s royal editor, Clive Goodman, proposing paying the police officers who guarded the queen. Quietly, Scotland Yard joined ...”

“... to perform the alchemy, and to get a licence you needed help from the top. The Washington Post’s David Hoffman, in the best journalistic account of the heroic age of Russian capitalism, The Oligarchs, found an old professor, the head of a giant research institute, who remembered Khodorkovsky and another young man coming to him to ask for some start-up ...”

“... closed for cleaning) in the entrance hall. This is a progressive facility. I chose a nice copy of The Ghost Stories of Edith Wharton from the shelves of the free library. Next time I come, I’ll bring something in exchange. The FOODTOGO refreshment cave featured a newspaper rack displaying a thick crop of the issue of the LRB in which Jonathan ...”

“... She exploited Austin’s role as the treasurer of Amherst College to wangle her own husband, David, into powerful university positions and forced him to build her a Queen Anne-style house just across from his family home. After his death she conned his surviving sister, Lavinia, into deeding her some land. But, perhaps most damning of all, Emily ...”

“... to dispose of their dog, for no particular reason except to ‘simplify their life’. The boy, David, of kindergarten age, can hardly share this hope but makes no plea in the animal’s favour: ‘The dog has crammed itself behind the pipes beneath the kitchen sink. David squats before him, blowing gently on his ...”

“... have heard’). ‘Barbara,’ Edmund Wilson decided, ‘is really a bad lot’: so bad that when David Pryce-Jones came to write his memoir of Connolly he thought it best to say nothing about her at all. On the other hand, it is part both of her disobliging character and its attraction that in compiling her own memoirs she does nothing to minimise her ...”

“... they have no feeling for Beauty and Art. And yet, by dint of toadying and sucking up and being nice, these women have snagged all the best teaching jobs, while Paglia has laboured alone and unheard at the Philadelphia College of Art. Her ethnicity, her integrity, her innocence, her refusal to play the academic game, have kept her back while less talented ...”

“... that’s no bad thing: her blend of crackling violence and surreal wit often seems closer to David Lynch than Aquinas.The theological approach receives a predictably complete expression in Christine Flanagan’s edition of The Letters of Flannery O’Connor and Caroline Gordon. The two women were introduced by Robert Lowell, who had met O’Connor at ...”

“... comes from Iago’s half-jesting comment to Desdemona, after she presses him to think of something nice to say about her: ‘O gentle lady, do not put me to’t,/For I am nothing if not critical.’ For all its forbidding pauselessness on the page, If Not Critical catches something of the movement of a speaking voice and the demands it makes on the ...”

“... 2000, the same year as Mankell’s similarly themed The Return of the Dancing Master, so it’s a nice touch that Hole is briefly taken off the case and sent to fester in Wallander’s territory, a.k.a. ‘some godforsaken place in Sweden’. ‘In the detective story,’ Auden writes in ‘The Guilty Vicarage’, the setting should be the Great Good ...”