“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... to the last. There is, however, one likely positive outcome. Like in a good Bible story, Lieberman may be undone by his own machinations. During the last Knesset, he suggested raising the electoral threshold from 2 per cent to 3.25 per cent, as a way of excluding Arab parties. As a result, the Jewish-Arab List, the National Democratic Assembly, the United Arab ...”

“... that ‘the calamity of mediocre taste is worse than the calamity of tastelessness,’ it may seem that we are invited to take their vision ironically, a promise of a future that can’t be better than tepid. Just wishful thinking then, a fake rainbow. But the friends have been provoked in part by the text of the now dead Yuri Zhivago’s ...”

“... Transitional National Council was well prepared. But insofar as the leaders mattered at all, it may be less for what they did than for what they didn’t do. Gaddafi’s state was not Saddam’s. He didn’t inherit, or rely on, a powerful pre-existing Baath Party apparatus. Or drag his people through an eight-year total war. He tortured and killed, but his ...”

“... sex life interested me. ‘In the looking-glass of Sade’s misanthropy,’ she wrote, ‘women may see themselves as they have been and it is an uncomfortable sight.’ Surely that should read ‘women may see themselves as they have been seen.’ But no. And who am I to say that the only thing to be seen in Sade’s ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... blandly charming Jane Seymour and her family. This is where Bring Up the Bodies begins. Its title may sound a bit Hammer Horror, but it comes from the phrase that was used when those accused of treason, and so legally dead, were brought up for trial. The king – who as he broadens and ages is becoming less sunny and a bit of a joke, a frightening one – is ...”

“... particular diagnoses, except when I need an example. Many worries have already been aired. In mid-May an onslaught was delivered by the Division of Clinical Psychology of the British Psychology Society, which is sceptical about the very project of standardised diagnosis, especially of schizophrenia and bipolar disorders. More generally, it opposes the ...”

“... that designate speech), as Eimear McBride does in her remarkable, harshly satisfying first novel, may not seem a particularly drastic discipline, set beside such feats as eliminating the letter ‘e’ (Perec’s La Disparition, Englished by Gilbert Adair as A Void) or telling Ophelia’s side of the story using only the words Shakespeare allots her (Paul ...”

“... own recorded national history is so brief. Conversely, a basic reason Europe-based historians may seem more parochial is that their continent contains a large number of small, declining nations, and this can put pressure on subject choice. A historian based in Belgium, say, who chooses not to write Belgian history, has good reason to fear that few people ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... in and out of our lives like a sort of extreme niece or nephew’. (If realised, this fantasy may have caused her husband some ‘cognitive dissonance’ of his own – regret at having missed out on years of conventional fatherhood and on the joy of having a child with the woman he’s married to and actually loves.) Daum agonises; her husband proves a ...”

“... 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 ...”