“... important to the story of the mural, if one follows its genesis in the drawings of April and early May 1937, is the larger question Picasso’s themes presented: how can the maternal body, whether pregnant or the source of the infant’s sustenance, be made to bear the marks of death? How could the painter find the means to convey such mortal threats? The ...”

“... to the present, can help us all to feel more at home in this strange place. Nostalgic historians may be classified according to the times and places in which they locate their homes. Some, like Henry Adams, seem to discover that far country through study and then begin to remember it as their own birthplace. Others, like David Donald and Jeffrey ...”

“... only with skills of a peculiar and precious kind, which have hitherto proved communicable but may not, in Bloom’s opinion, be so much longer. He would never allow it to be assumed that the canon offers easy reads. On the contrary, the dedicated labour it requires ensures that its devotees, like the canon itself, must be an élite. ‘Aesthetic value ...”

“... of Sartre and Raymond Aron, future historians of French intellectuals in the Eighties and Nineties may well be condemned to structuring their narratives around the post-Marx brothers of French intellectual life, Bernard-Henri Lévy and Alain Finkielkraut. This is not a case simply of contemporary thinkers being dwarfed by the giants of the past – the ...”

“... revealed, by genetic testing, to have a higher than ordinary risk of contracting some disease that may require expensive medical treatment. Suppose the present decline in the quality of the NHS is not arrested and the system continues to deteriorate, until it is little better than Medicaid in the US, a grubby, grudging and inadequate safety net for those who ...”

“... manifestations of a single, heavily disguised and hydra-headed evil. Its current manifestations may be Islamic fundamentalism and the Republican administration in the United States, but we should not be deceived by appearances: ‘Radical Islam may be best described as Islamo-Jacobinism’; ‘neoconservatism originated ...”

“... broke out.Now, it’s clear that Walmart knew that Tazreen was producing their clothes, because in May 2011 a contractor working for a Walmart supplier called NTD Apparel conducted an audit of the factory. Walmart told me that the factory was reaudited again in December 2011. It takes three separate audits for a factory to be disqualified from producing for ...”

“... with the posher parts of a fantasy universe. But we don’t forget having had the thought, and we may wonder whether a flight from fantasy is not often part of what is felt to be real.The film opens with an engaging variant on this question – engaging until it becomes cruel, and both fantasy and reality disappear into silence. We see Nicole ...”

“... underlies all these cases. Killing human beings is part of ordinary business practice. Problems may arise only in the way we do it.Where are we when the mismanaged murder occurs? We are in Fairfax, Oklahoma, in the early 1920s. A newsreel has told us why we are here. This territory belongs to the Osage, a tribe of Indigenous Americans, and they have ...”

“... of innocence. We are awake and also dreaming. The suggestion, I think, is that life as we live it may be largely an affair of props and sets, and Anderson is inviting us not to feel too bad about this possibility. The question ‘Who framed Asteroid City?’ looks towards the same answer as Who Framed Roger Rabbit. We did, with some prompts from the ...”

“... proliferate; it has charts showing the transmission networks of HIV, ‘arranged so that readers may thumb through them, as with a “flip-book”’. Fassin’s is a self-doubting text, fascinating and difficult, in which a shack is an ‘ephemeral construction’. In the end, their conclusions draw closer than the reader could have foreseen. Neither allows ...”

“... a ball into a net. What is a ‘fair’ advantage? Being confident and being able to speak clearly may be helpful qualifications for a barrister who has to lead in a crowded court, but we have to ask where these capacities come from, who is likely to have them, and so on. These are all familiar arguments, or at least they were. I’m rehearsing them here only ...”

“... novel was unprecedented. For Eliot, this type of novel, ‘most notably illustrated’ by May Sinclair’s Life and Death of Harriett Frean, was not promising. ‘The conclusion of Miss Sinclair’s book,’ he writes, ‘extracts as much pity and terror as can be extracted from the materials: but because the material is so clearly defined (the soul ...”

“... appeared on page 618; the same letter in the new edition concludes on page 816. Yet those figures may understate the extent of the transformation achieved by the new edition. The earlier edition contained 509 letters by T.S. Eliot, 37 by his first wife, Vivien, and 40 by various others. The new edition adds 195 more letters by Eliot, another 27 by Vivien and ...”

“... inconclusive general election, as though Italy is about to have a new government. On Friday, 18 May, the Movimento 5 Stelle and the Lega Nord published the text of a coalition agreement, signed by their respective leaders, Luigi Di Maio and Matteo Salvini, and overwhelmingly approved by the members of both parties. They also came up with a suggestion for a ...”