“... and even reviewers should beware: intellectual standards on the Baxter campus are high, and they may come up against unshaven desperadoes in short waistcoats draped with six-guns, pointing stubby fingers demandingly in their direction. (‘The way I figger it – truth is un-truth insofar as there belongs to it the reservoir of the not-yet-revealed, the ...”

“... on central issues, meaningful debate is difficult, bordering on the unachievable. Worse still, it may be difficult to get a debate at all. It was a disgrace that despite many requests from uncomfortable MPs for the recall of Parliament in those decisive weeks of August after Saddam Hussein’s army had gone into Kuwait, the House of Commons didn’t finally ...”

“... thought, and protested forcibly against, so many things that the critic has to protect himself. He may know a lot about the first generation of European Communists but less about paper-making or indigo or Victorian business management – Morris being one of the pioneers of a ‘house style’. In spite of this, all the emphasis today is on his wholeness. In ...”

“... renewing the vows of his poetic faith and pronouncing against old heresies. His position may sound embattled but we know that it is eminent. His aggravations have become his quirks, so that, for example, when he speaks of ‘the mindless sludge of surrealist verse’, we feel it to be less an expression of anger and revulsion than a reminder that in ...”

“... watching the Investiture, people were more aware of the domestic than of the ceremonial aspect. He may have got it slightly wrong. It is the combination of the two which is fascinating: not the thought that the hero of the ceremony is just an ordinary person, but the thought that he is both – both human and god, both a hereditary monarch and the eldest of a ...”

“... Victorian critic lay directly behind her own aesthetic of scrupulous watchfulness. Such insights may indeed be valuable, but what Tomlinson’s recollections most touchingly convey is the elegiac mood already referred to. Miss Moore’s anxiety that her visitor should approve of New York (‘I was afraid you wouldn’t like it – it’s gotten so ...”

“... its chapters on the buildings of the city and on the learned men who lived there, although one may wish that he had allowed himself a little more space in his narrative chapters, where characters and places crowd in upon each other. Yet all four books have striking similarities. In the first place, they all have very considerable problems because of the ...”

“... events, he can achieve a sort of overlapping that suggests that something else, opaque, laconic, may be hidden under the overlaps. This isn’t obscurantism – simply a moderate and skilful exercise in Modernist narrative techniques by someone who thinks them appropriate to what he wants to do – not to his ‘meaning’, which is not, on his ...”

“... are here’) or the winding parallels in diagrams of library stacks. The book you are looking for may be so many up and so many along, but you are no closer to having it in your hand, much less being able to read it. It’s a mixture of phrenology and butchery. Even the labels make me feel squeamish and hopeless: ‘Another interesting finding is that the ...”

“... don’t especially like car crashes, exploding buildings and the overuse of assault weapons, you may want to stay away from the cinema for a while. Well, you could have started to stay away even before the pandemic, because it often seemed there was nothing else to see, whether the noise and violence involved superheroes or just special agents in suits. But ...”

“... The Queen’s Speech​ in May included proposals for a new Public Order Bill intended, according to the government’s briefing notes, to deal with ‘highly disruptive protests’, such as those by Insulate Britain and Extinction Rebellion, and against HS2. It will resuscitate clauses from the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill that were rejected by the Lords, such as the criminalisation of ‘locking on’: when a person attaches themselves to ‘another person, to an object or to land’ and, by doing so, might potentially cause disruption to two or more people or to an organisation ...”

“... been suggestions of a connection between Sarao’s trading and the wild market convulsions of 6 May 2010 that have become known as the ‘flash crash’. The DoJ alleges that between 11.17 a.m. and 1.40 p.m. (Chicago time) a fifth or more of all the orders to sell S&P 500 index futures were Sarao’s. It would be remarkable if a single trader, operating on ...”

“... the topic for us. When we see that the apparent leader of one of the gangs is also the sheriff, we may think of Leone’s Italy as it appears in so many legends and quite a bit of history. And in the fiction of Leonardo Sciascia and Michael Dibdin, where a crucial question about any crime is not who did it, but what to do with any knowledge you ...”

“... Parliament warned that unless significant work is carried out swiftly, major, irreversible damage may be done to the Palace. Since then, things have deteriorated: 50 per cent of the Palace’s mechanical and electrical services are at high risk of failure by 2020. The report echoed the call made in 1828 by John Soane for ‘revision and speedy amendment’ to ...”

“... like this have led people like Elon Musk to think about where they source their nickel. In May, he met the president of Indonesia, Joko Widodo, to discuss possible ‘partnerships’. He is interested because nickel is required for long-range electric cars. The batteries in a single Tesla contain about forty kilos of it. The Indonesian ...”