“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... A ‘progressive’ system means, broadly speaking, that some people pay more than others for the same benefit, on the grounds that they can afford to, just as some pay more taxes, both absolutely and proportionally, to fund government services. There can be no doubt that the Coalition policy on student debt is ‘progressive’ in the sense that some will pay (back) more than others depending on how much they earn after graduation ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... audience, and as a writer rather than a speaker he must resort to stylistic rather than dialogical means. Style is part of Nietzsche’s philosophical project and not a merely ‘literary’ device because Nietzsche does have something to say to his audience. Although ‘it often seems as if the aim of Nietzsche’s writing is to construct ideas that grip the ...”

“... an institution, a body of texts whose study, from O-level to the highest reaches of academia, is a means of legitimating social advancement and whose production on the stage and on television makes a powerful contribution to Britain’s invisible exports. This ‘Shakespeare’ has the characteristics Roland Barthes ascribes to myth: it turns history into ...”

“... War – more than two million words, if you choose to include the indexes (and he did). By no means all these words were Churchill’s – many came from his research assistants and more than a few from the Cabinet Secretary Norman Brook, who vetted the volumes for the Government and paraphrased sensitive passages. The composition and impact of the ...”