“... parallelism, ‘Here . . . Here . . .’ – continuity with the past. Betty’s cottage may be ‘little’ and ‘weather-stained’, and her ‘unpainted outbuildings . . . bleak’, but what redeems them is her cultivation of the values of her antebellum existence, symbolised by the ‘old-fashioned plants and flowers’ that soften the outlines ...”

“... the most physical of facts cannot escape meaning (the empty face that intends its emptiness), and may contain or hint at a virtual existence (the unscathed nose which bears witness to the possibility of accident or assault). But the act of severity which announces writerliness is also its dissolution. Its double edge folds neatly up into the choice of a ...”

“... the whole category is in danger of sinking without trace. This theoretical death of the subject may reflect among other things some rather more tangible disappearances. In the era of Auschwitz, events take place that slip over the horizon of any conceivable experience. Only intellectuals, one might think, could regard experience as a category in its own ...”

“... when viewed from the European perspective Wullschlager consistently invites us to adopt, may seem small beer. This is in part the consequence of a linguistically imposed isolation. The incentives, and indeed the capacity, to translate from Danish were not very great in the 19th century – even Andersen’s works, the one exception, were normally ...”

“... the heroic tale of filial duty, ‘Casabianca’ (‘The boy stood on the burning deck’). Byron may have been the wrong type of man to find favour among the critics of the 19th century, but Hemans – with what Byron described as her ‘false stilted trashy style which is a mixture of all the styles of the day’ – was the right type of woman. She was ...”

“... England 1660-1800 (1986) – a pioneering study of trends in crime and prosecution in Surrey – may now be seen as a prelude to a masterpiece. Policing and Punishment in London 1660-1750 bears all the marks of protracted archival digging followed by mature reflection. Beattie approaches the law and its enforcement as a system with its own internal ...”

“... or neutralised. Advocates of releasing genetically engineered organisms into the environment may stress how unlikely it is that the gene will spread through wild populations, but the prospect of using genes designed to do just this is sure to alarm anti-GM activists. Anyway creating such an organism is still technically challenging – the scheme to ...”

“... the adherents of rival conceptions, one cannot legitimately view their choices as irrational. Some may have misunderstood the facts or committed logical fallacies; but such moral choices, concerning how to conduct our lives as a whole, all face what he calls the burdens of judgment. The relevant evidence is complex and conflicting, and the weight to be ...”

“... official reason her husband has never returned, but weariness with his wife’s emotional violence may be the reason behind the official one. Thirteen-year-old Matilda, Dolores’s daughter, has her mother’s intelligence without her frightening aggressiveness. Quick and sympathetic, she is the one who notes that it is ‘those dogs and chickens that had ...”

“... lose to a bunch of pirates? The phenomenon certainly seems to demand an explanation, though there may be more than one. Wood starts with a broad perspective and narrows down steadily to the events of 14 October itself, though these must remain largely unknowable. She sketches out the history of the earlier 11th century, made confusing above all by the habit ...”

“... amount of iridium would suggest it had taken a long time, indicating that the extinction process may also have been lengthy; a small amount would suggest that a quick event had overtaken the Earth. But the samples contained a surprise: huge amounts of iridium, so much that it would have taken tens or hundreds of millions of years to deposit at background ...”

“... Soviet leaders were increasingly keen that Chinese students come to Moscow: the German revolution may have foundered, but Soviet internationalists had not lost hope. In May 1925, anti-imperialist protests involving workers and students broke out in Shanghai, Guangdong and other major cities; later that year, the Chinese ...”

“... contradiction between form and content was to have a long after-history: Bernard Shaw’s plays may issue subversive messages, but the loving precision with which their stage directions detail the furniture or the colour of the maid’s stockings suggests a reality too massively solid to be more than tinkered with. These 18th-century utopias exist on the ...”

“... if the magnitude of the event is considered – the loss of very few lives. From this moment we may consider France as a free country.’ By the end of the Reign of Terror in 1793-94 and two decades of war with other great powers, the loss of life had turned out to be much greater than Dorset thought. Yet the awesomeness of 1789 as a model of human ...”

“... from one half of a simile to the other.An even larger presence in Tawada’s imagination, however, may be Paul Celan. She once planned on writing an academic essay on him; instead, he became the absent subject of Spontaneous Acts (published in the US as Paul Celan and the Trans-Tibetan Angel). The novella is so waywardly digressive that it’s hard to describe ...”