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“... formally lost the grandiose title of Great Repeal Bill, bestowed when it was introduced by Theresa May at the Conservative Party conference in October last year. The 1832 Representation of the People Act was better known by its grander, informal title of Great Reform Act. Indeed, this might be an apt precedent: the presence of the word ‘reform’ in its ...”

“... that cure the symptoms of disease. Our folk feeling that medicine has to be bitter to do any good may derive from the fact that natural cures often taste of tannins or alkaloids. A chimp with a stomach ache may seek out a broad-spectrum antidote like the bitter-leaf. Or it may swallow ...”

“... than under Tyrants. Everyone knows that democracies, though they clothe themselves in virtue, may get travestied by the inwardly vicious. Everyone also suspects himself, as Scott Fitzgerald noted, of possessing at least one cardinal virtue. Where politicians continually have to flatter a demos that sees them as clay-footed, each citizen, banjaxed and ...”

“... to have been a love match, or at least merely a love match. One of Jacopo’s sons, Giovanni, may have been Mantegna’s pupil or protégé: he was five or so years younger than Mantegna, seems not to have achieved by this date any great reputation, and his early work was remarkably similar in manner to that of his brother-in-law, as is clear to visitors ...”

“... other contexts than the doctrinal. By the same logical, even if not theological rule, historians may not expound one period in such a way as to make it repugnant to another. Like the principle of the Thirty-Nine Articles, this is one which is extremely difficult to apply, since it involves co-operation and give-and-take between people of widely different ...”

“... pale of art any fiction that appeared to have ideological designs upon the reader. An author (we may say) who permitted his own unmediated speculative persuasions to dominate what purported to be dramatic and personative was thereby betraying the art of the novel. Wells had much literary history on his side in regarding this as too narrow a canon. And James ...”

“... American bestseller list again, with the name ‘Winona Ryder’ over the title instead of Louisa May Alcott, as if she had written the book. But maybe Ryder deserves top billing, for pulling people into the movies to see Alcott’s March sisters updated for the Nineties. Directed by Gillian Armstrong of My Brilliant Career, with Susan Sarandon as Marmee, the ...”

“... 2. enough. 3. lots?’), nevertheless feels it appropriate to point out that ‘Eliot’s caveat may apply to honesty in the marriage relation but rock-climbers would opt for complete trust and truthfulness.’ Truthfulness, along with every other moral rule, is capable of conflicting with the obligation to benevolence. Can ‘sociological ...”

“... many people who are willing, in the presence of others, to call themselves intellectuals. There may even be those for whom intellectuals are a fiction, like fairies. But most people would struggle to their feet to attest to their existence. ‘Intellectual’ is a word which is hard to use without irony or reproof; often, it is a slur, and it has often ...”

“... as if subjecting the world to continual enquiry on this important issue. The sign ‘V’ may somehow hold together the dispersed elements of V, or it may not. The trajectory and the history of the V2 rockets in the seven-hundred-page fantasia of Gravity’s Rainbow promote, as Richard Poirier remarked in a ...”

“... assured I shall never demand it again, from any apprehension that hereafter the friendliness in it may be at variance with whatever feeling I please to entertain thirty years hence. Accordingly I set down with no sort of misgiving that I am, Dear Lady Olliffe, Yours very truly Robert Browning. This jeu d’esprit – which testifies nonetheless, in ...”

“... than it seems. The whole point of the philosophers’ hostility to rhetoric is that, while it may not kill bodies, it can maim minds, securing assent not by argument but by an emotional manipulation which respects truth only in so far as it serves the end of manipulation. Therefore, as with guns, there is an immediate danger in this use, before one ...”

“... the parallel is in the willingness of many of the electorate to accept that whoever’s fault it may be, it is not the Government’s. Whether blame more properly belongs with rapacious trade unions, or cut-wage Third World competitors, or feather-bedding employers, or cartel-forming oil sheikhs, or merely the old impersonal economic forces (whatever they ...”

“... A fight between two males passes through three main stages, at any of which one of the contestants may back out. They start with broadside displays, move on to tail beating, and then to harmless mouth fighting, in which the pair grip and pull each other by the mouth. The rules of the contest are, according to Lorenz, strictly obeyed. Each fish only moves on to ...”

“... are restrained by a pack of ‘yellow cards’ and ‘white cards’ prescribing how and when they may open fire or carry out arrests. Political considerations, not the simple question of how best to find and destroy the enemy, govern their deployment and their actions. They are supposed to co-operate with the Royal Ulster Constabulary, a force which 3 ...”