“... thought of without a consideration of madness (and vice versa) is not to say, as Phillips fears it may be, that sanity is merely evacuated lunacy, the blank space left when the demons are gone. It is only to see how intimately the words are related to each other. He is right, of course, to suggest, as he does in Monogamy, that ‘we need to find a way of ...”

“... on the retreat but able to stage daily suicide bomb attacks, ambushes and assassinations. On 4 May a man with explosives attached to his body blew himself up in a queue of young men trying to join the police in Arbil, killing 60 of them and wounding 150. Ghassan Attiyah, a political commentator in Baghdad, told me that ‘the Kurds were able to destabilise ...”

“... it is, the less certain the outcome. The accuser can end up all but in the dock; the accused may walk away from a true bill. Churchill, well aware of this, wanted the Nazi leaders, when they were finally captured, to be taken out and shot. Roosevelt initially agreed. It was Stalin, who had found that trials could be exceedingly satisfactory in both ...”

“... of view it proves his duplicity. The actor who pretends to be Hamlet is not really Hamlet but may be as much Hamlet as anyone is ever going to be; the person who pretends to an illness – a so-called mental illness – may not really be ill, but can be as ill as anyone can be. At the very least, pretending to be ...”

“... be dialogical: we must aim to achieve consensus through debate and conversation with others who may have adopted interpretations different from our own. We must therefore not only give weight to our fellow citizens’ views in the decision-making process, but also construct a political and social system that delivers the conditions without which they could ...”

“... with thought-patterns predicated on notions of order, balance and discipline. His behaviour may seem self-pitying and his demeanour lumbering, but he is fundamentally a decent person and very rarely a dishonest one, as the evidence collected here demonstrates. The pomposity of his addresses to the mirror may grate on ...”

“... you must also, of course, find (or construct for yourself) appropriate packs of cards. And this may prove quite a problem. The 12 games described require packs of various sizes: 78 cards, 62 cards, 63 cards, 54 cards, 42 cards, 36 cards. But that is only the beginning. Here, in summary, is a description of the Tarot pack known as Tarocco Bolognese, which ...”

“... unmentionable fact.’ She discusses prostitution and free unions. But what the portrait of Rhoda may lack in subtlety it makes up for in ambivalence, which after all produces a similar effect. Gissing’s admiration appears to break down at several important points in the plot. He makes her show none of the female solidarity which should have animated a New ...”

“... great divergences of opinion, not hard-and-fast orthodoxies, even if the balance of such opinions may have differed as between regions, confessions and social or professional groups. One of the greatest common merits of the two books under review, so different in many respects, is that they emphasise the extent and severity of these disagreements. In this ...”

“... the knowledge that you have unknown enemies lurking in the shadows hasn’t changed. Such attacks may have serious consequences, and this is formally recognised. Like their numberless digital counterparts, assaults on paper are a criminal offence. The Malicious Communications Act (1988) makes it illegal in England and Wales to ‘send or deliver letters or ...”

“... and taking tea, or that in the city, far from the rarefied court, ‘Wretches hang that Jury-men may Dine’? Does the poem point, in short, to a skull beneath the flawless skin, or is the flawless skin the only thing that counts? As if such indeterminacies weren’t enough, Pope’s next move was to sneak out a bogus commentary of his own, written in the ...”

“... might be gained by consuming it. Incised amulets from ancient Greece show signs of scraping, which may indicate that the powder produced was mixed with liquid and drunk. Christianity inherited the sympathetic view of the cosmos, as well as the connection between physical healing and blessing. In the sixth century, a man was cured of his intestinal worms after ...”

“... the mackerel-crowded seas more mackerel-crowded than any seas a man of my age can describe. It may be true. It may be true. You’re born in Cork in 1900, you grow up with the new century and with a sense of an equally new Ireland. In the dawn of Easter Week, 1916, some youngsters, including O’Faolain, probably felt ...”

“... of impersonating a shopkeeper. Not a ‘snobbish’ shopkeeper either (if the anachronistic usage may be permitted), nor, as we have seen, one who seeks to disguise his own humble origins. There is a gap between the Drapier’s voice and his impersonator, not necessarily because Swift would not have admitted to humble origins, but because he would hardly have ...”