“... wished to stick a knife in the donor. In the first paragraphs of The Third Policeman we now may notice in a different way how the nameless narrator comments that his father ‘did not talk much’, that his father and he ‘were strangers and did not converse much ... we were all happy enough in a queer separate way.’ In another dimension we ...”

“... beyond the Call of Duty: The Nature of Power within Psychiatry’. Typos can be dangerous. Reality may not be as exciting, but finding it can be a great relief to a troubled mind. I describe this passing moment partly as an example of how easy it is to lose one’s bearings about what makes sense, but also, quite gratuitously, to avoid grappling with my real ...”

“... as a cabaret performer. Opening the current Le Corbusier exhibition at the Barbican (until 24 May), the architect Rafael Viñoly revealed that the pair had already snatched a secret ten days together in Uruguay, Viñoly’s own country, before leaving for Europe, partying on their way back to Bordeaux on the Lutétia. Le Corbusier told his mother that ...”

“... where that means something like ‘mediated by thought’. But plausible as that may seem, the thesis of Andy Clark’s new book, Supersizing the Mind, is that the mind v. world dualism is untenable. The best way through Clark’s book is to start by reading the foreword by David Chalmers and the paper by Clark and Chalmers that is reprinted ...”

“... It’s not that we doubt the truth of any of these statements, or even that we feel Eliot may be oversharing, as some say these days – many of the recipients of these letters really wanted to know how he was. And to be fair, the cumulative effect is available only to readers of this volume, since the letters went out to separate persons one by ...”

“... much about it, our thoughts inevitably turn to the Conservatives, and to what they might do after May 2010. In a very general sense we know what they would like to do: cut public expenditure so as to restore ‘order’ to the state’s finances. But everyone else would do that too, with more or less enthusiasm. More difficult to predict is the detail of ...”

“... from travellers and redial recent calls. If the call is answered by a government office the owner may be killed on the spot. Taliban rule is not total across southern Afghanistan, but much of the area has been a no man’s land since 2006. Afghan truckers carrying supplies for US or Nato forces have to pay local security companies for protection or bribe ...”

“... during a demonstration against Israeli settlements in East Jerusalem. He began this novel in May 2003. One of his two sons was already in the army, doing the three-year military service compulsory in Israel, while his younger son, Uri, was awaiting his call-up papers. Against this background of fears for his country and for his children, Grossman set out ...”

“... of labour (i.e. unemployment), the reason must be that (real) wages are too high. This theory may not only misinterpret Keynes, but may also be potentially dangerous, because of its obvious policy implications. If unemployment is caused by real wages being too high, the obvious remedy is to lower wages. Hence the ...”

“... to? It’s impossible to know! It’s impossible to say!’ (Jacques Normand for Fasquelle). ‘I may be dead from the neck up, but rack my brains as I may, I fail to understand why a man needs thirty pages to describe how he tosses and turns in his bed before falling asleep’ (Georges Boyer for Ollendorff ). As Tadié ...”

“... it shows the prostitute in her true light, as victim not criminal. But abolitionist feminists may well be uneasy with the company they’re keeping: the All-Party Parliamentary Group’s secretariat is the homophobic, anti-abortion charity Christian Action Research and Education. On the other side, sex worker advocates say that those who want to rescue ...”

“... of minorities (behind France but ahead of Germany), despite the hard turn against immigration; we may be sexist – according to the UN rapporteur on violence against women – but we’re not homophobic; and we’re no longer at the bottom of Unicef’s child well-being league table for rich countries, as we were in 2007. Britain’s unemployment rate is ...”

“... is nothing they abhor so much as the novel’s standard vice and stand-by, overwriting. Kundera may occasionally be didactic or self-indulgent or not as interesting as he thinks he is, but he never overwrites. It is strange to think that Kundera began as a poet; less strange, maybe (intellectualist prestidigitations have remained his thing), that it was as ...”

“... of in our house. My father liked to say: ‘I have no time for a man who cannot weep’ (he may have been quoting Churchill). At bedtime, tears would gather in his blue-bloodshot eyes as he read his favourite poems to us. John Dowland’s ‘Weep you no more, sad fountains’ was a favourite. Another was Christina Rossetti’s ‘When I am dead, my ...”

“... What’s​ really so bad about death? Unlike heartbreak, debt, public speaking or whatever else we may be afraid of, our own death isn’t something we experience. ‘Death,’ Epicurus said, ‘is nothing to us, since so long as we exist, death is not with us; but when death comes, then we do not exist.’ Death is not an event in life ...”