“... Thanks to David Mamet’s new play Oleanna, the distracted, bumbling and self-regarding male professor has now become the archetypal victim of political correctness. Mamet’s John is victimised by Carol, the ultimate female intellectual mediocrity who gets her revenge on his patronising didacticism by turning him in to the university tenure committee on grounds of sexual impropriety ...”

“... range of Brexit options at a Tory Conference fringe event in October, the former Brexit minister David Jones concluded: ‘If necessary, as Churchill once said, very well then, alone.’ This is the sort of nostalgia Stuart Hall warned against as early as the 1970s, and which Peter Ammon, the outgoing German ambassador in London, identified recently when he ...”

“... thinking’, as he put it in his 1987 talk. Attridge believes that thinking about Coetzee’s work means engaging directly with the cultural, ethical and political implications of this commitment. What this means, in practice, is recognising that ‘our’ most cherished critical assumptions and vocabularies might not be up ...”

“... be made use of in ways that are contextually effective, and surprisingly original. That is what David Piper contrived to do in a brilliant one-off war novel, Trial by Battle. It describes the experiences of a young officer, the reverse of professional, during the 1941 Malayan campaign between the British-Indian Army and the Japanese: the campaign which led ...”

“... and are there stopped in time, not yet falling but not yet safe. In her imagining of this slender means of support as about to fall, or liable to fall, Favret is thinking and feeling after 9/11. That she may have felt the same way before 9/11 occurred doesn’t make this any less true. Modern wartime makes futures out of its present. In Coleridge’s ‘Frost ...”

“... sometimes called the ‘doctrine of accommodation’ – by the Arabic word talat.t.uf, which means ‘shrewdness in the service of loving kindness’. (Christians might think here of 1 Corinthians 3.2: ‘I fed you with milk and not solid food, for you were not able to take it.’) From his Cordoban Muslim contemporary Ibn Rushd (known in the West as ...”

“... looks more like an extension of what happens in Northern Ireland. If a return to the early 1970s means British politics being overshadowed by entrenched divisions in Northern Ireland, then here we go again. But that isn’t what Brexit was designed to achieve. Liberating the British political system from Brussels offers the appearance of a real choice but it ...”

“... literary Modernists and examining the genesis of their major writings. Mutual influence is by no means the sole topic of such enquiries, but it certainly features. Brown does not seem to be aware of them. He is right to draw attention to Lewis’s striking and influential Vorticist prose: the short stories about Brittany and Spain begun in 1909 and finally ...”

“... memo from the tobacco industry put it in 1969, ‘Doubt is our product since it is the best means of competing with the “body of fact” that exists in the mind of the general public.’ Proctor and other historians have documented the way asbestos, nuclear and chemical companies also tried to sow doubt about their products causing cancer, and put ...”

“... which in her view should always be conducted in the presence of the work of art, rather than by means of reproductions – in favour of the study of ‘narrative content’. ‘Medium, composition, mise-en-page spatial organisation, pose and gesture, colour, light and shade, mark-making processes – indeed the whole physical object – must be taken into ...”

“... the experience of holding his own life up to scrutiny adds humanity to his reflections on what it means to come to terms with the past. This book has all the qualities we associate with its author: journalistic legwork, intellectual curiosity, supple prose and a beady eye for detail. Unlike chatty Stasi informers, he can capture a character or milieu with ...”

“... her. Zischler’s method throughout Kafka Goes to the Movies is to develop his argument by means of extensive quotation both from the diaries and letters and from a wide range of additional material, some of it fascinating. He has shown remarkable enterprise and tenacity in tracking down prints of the films Kafka saw, or, where these are no longer ...”

“... the legislation addressed, but 18th-century fiction. The path she follows is not obvious, by any means – particularly as she has not chosen the fiction that most directly confronted issues of injustice (Candide, say, or Montesquieu’s Persian Letters). Instead, Hunt draws attention to epistolary novels of private lives and loves, above all Richardson’s ...”

“... David Craig has an unfashionable concern with truth-telling in fiction. In his earlier role as a literary critic, he wrote a book called The Real Foundations in which he showed how some of the most respected 19th and 20th-century novelists and poets had blatantly falsified social reality. If a work of realistic fiction is to be convincing in general, according to Craig, it ought to convince us in particulars ...”

“... Coast that a federal government is sometimes a useful thing to have. The advent of postal voting means that the day itself is not quite as special as it once was, but it remains the focus of campaigning, and the nexus of all media coverage. It’s when the horse race ends. And no mere act of God is going to move the finish line. This is a system of politics ...”