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“... obscure provisions need deciphering; occasional nonsense needs correcting; perfectly clear texts may be impossible to apply to novel situations. These and other quotidian exercises are the subject of judgments and commentaries which try to bring ordered methods to bear on the translation of a text into an outcome – that is to say, on trying to give a law ...”

“... that the deity tends not to comment directly on current affairs these days, the anxious recruit may have struggled to put this advice into practice. Browsing leaders from the previous couple of decades might have yielded a more concrete sense of what was wanted. It would appear that omniscience is one attribute of the God-like perspective; absence of ...”

“... or history in Britain, only the clever public schoolboy’s occasional smart remarks. Although it may be early to judge, since in future instalments the characters may mature in unexpected ways, it does seem from the hares being started here that the insights to be pursued will be fairly familiar from the ...”

“... If you are already aware of John Gray (1866-1934), you may well have a particular interest in the 1890s, or in certain aspects of Catholicism.* You may have fleetingly met the name in period biographies – Beardsley’s, Yeats’s, Wilde’s. Wasn’t Gray supposed to be model for ‘Dorian’? Or you may simply have come across an extraordinary poem called ‘The Flying Fish’, which more than anything has roused and tantalised curiosity ...”

“... someone else might intend especially problematic. The court commented that a bank robber, who ‘may have leisure to think before going out to rob a bank’, and may well contemplate the use of lethal force by an accomplice, may reasonably be considered a ‘secondary party’ to a ...”

“... A couple of markers may help. We are all situated somewhere, even if we see ourselves as cosmopolitans emancipated from mere biography. I was a beneficiary of the old idealistic British system, a grammar-school boy who went to Cambridge in the 1950s when not too many people were so lucky. If we can’t afford such a system any longer because we wish to make a good education available to many more people – if that is our real reason and our real intention – then we have to think of proper new ways of funding it ...”

“... But if the mystery shopper happens to be served by someone momentarily off their game, who may be named and shamed in the report, no one gets rewarded. The bonus is significant, £1 per hour for the week’s work, upping the starting salary of £6.25 (just higher than the UK minimum wage of £6.19) by 16 per cent. Pamsu have a list of grievances ...”

“... gives a sprightly sense of what Mew was like; at times she seems to mimic her. Charlotte Mew may have grown up to be secretive – she was certainly no party-goer – but she wrote quite freely about her childhood, directly in prose, obliquely in her poems. She enjoyed nursery life: in some ways she never got over it. ‘I like you best when you are ...”

“... about Roth rather than his fiction. Why this persistence after all these years?If that’s so, it may have to do with the intensity with which my fiction has focused upon the self-revealing dilemmas of a single, central character whose biography, in certain obvious details, overlaps with mine, and who is then assumed ‘to be’ me.The Ghost Writer was ...”

“... As Major-General Skippon, who knew his soldiers well, observed when warning Parliament in May against ‘the disobliging of so faithful an army’, ‘provocation and exasperation makes men think of that they never intended.’ By June the Army was assuming a political role commensurate with its contribution to victory. It demanded guarantees of ...”

“... I understand it, is one of those golden moments of our history; one of those opportunities which may come and may go, but which rarely return, or, if they return, return at long intervals, and under circumstances which no man can forecast.’ Thus Gladstone, unsuccessfully commending to the Commons the first Home Rule ...”

“... Analysis has largely concentrated on the amount graduates might pay and on which social groups may gain or lose by comparison with the present system. In other words, the discussion has focused narrowly on the potential financial implications for the individual student, and here it should be recognised that some of the details of Browne’s proposed system ...”

“... how, by trick, by election or by sin, characters break open, split apart, see things that may be themselves, even meet the return of their true selves. And, of course, get to meet the Devil. Over a dram, or out in the gale, or in some German place of retreat and learning, the fiendish splits are revealed. The time ...”

“... were not in some fashion courtly, and to regard as elevated and apolitical those that were. There may be those who will tax Norbrook himself with conservatism for his unapologetic preoccupation with the traditionally masculine concerns of national politics. They will await the more eagerly his forthcoming study of Lucy Hutchinson, who, not content with ...”

“... from the surely self-evident proposition that great poets don’t have to be good men; that Hardy may have been, as it seems he was, a lousy husband, but that he may have been a great poet all the same. For this defence to work, it has to be shown that Hardy’s lack of magnanimity, which did such harm in his life and the ...”