“... survey, and what they survey is the speaker of the main text. But they also suggest that Thady’s may be the better method – the fairy lore, it turns out, has a shrewdly pragmatic set of functions hidden within its rituals. Edgeworth remarks in one note that fairy-mounds often had riches of one kind or another concealed in them and the stories forbidding ...”

“... of the old Nixon buddy, ‘Bebe Rebozos’. The fantasy that class division no longer exists may be the ultimate commodity on sale at the Megastore, and it is often served up as a contemporary revision of the foundational myth of the United States – that no such division existed in the first place. There are other magical resolutions on offer in Nobrow ...”

“... of Eliot’s reputation. Ploughing through these packed and not always fascinating columns may tell us as much about the craft, if that is the right word, of highbrow reviewing as it does about Eliot. On the English side one notices a steady reduction in pomposity, signalled by the disappearance of the reviewer’s plural first-person pronoun – a ...”

“... and dividing the weekends in London between his new and his old families. Unconventional this may have been, but as Wrigley shows, Taylor found it highly functional. Up at dawn and at the typewriter soon afterwards to tap out his thousand words a day (‘I try not to write more,’ he told Ved Mehta), he turned out a steady stream of books (including The ...”

“... a conversation, acknowledging the presence and participation of the other. Two independent voices may be played by the same musician, on a keyboard, for instance, but they are more often given to two players, who must listen to each other. By no means all European music is predominantly contrapuntal; much of it is melody with harmony, the kind of music that ...”

“... prefer not to be adored for their lack of brains and their closeness to nature. ‘Love in men may be merely a drive,’ Kraus writes in Dicta and Contradicta, ‘but even the most thoughtless woman loves in the service of an idea. Even the woman that merely sacrifices to a stranger’s drives is morally superior to the man who only serves his ...”

“... a weight of psychological and religious investment to be abandoned with impunity. But, as Galileo may or may not have whispered after his 1632 recantation, things do in the end move: for Romans the (imaginary) Rhipaean Mountains retreat further and further as exploration forces back the boundaries of the unknown; the Earth ...”

“... between ‘storm in a teacup’ and ‘figment of Cicero’s imagination’. Catiline himself may have been a far-sighted radical (cancellation of debts could have been just what Rome needed in 63 BC); he might equally well have been an unprincipled terrorist. We cannot now tell. But there is a fair chance that he was driven to violence by a Consul ...”

“... at all on his soul). They are set in what the publisher calls classic Updike territory, which may or may not be a region you want to revisit. If Updike’s earlier work was consumed with wife-swapping, his late work is consumed by nostalgia for it. In the majority of the stories, a man, now in his sixties and sheltering ...”

“... there are loud expressions of satisfaction. The excitement quickly fades, though: soon the Syrians may need more than just cosmetic defiance. On 28 June, Israeli fighter jets flew over President Bashar al-Assad’s palace near the coastal town of Latakia. According to the state-run media, the jets reached the border and were chased away by anti-aircraft ...”

“... Nazi daily paper, had to report the destruction of the German Sixth Army. Merridale’s purpose may be to put the individual soldier in focus as a subject in his own right, but that doesn’t stop her from telling an ‘epic story’ of the fighting and dying in the shell of Stalingrad left after an annihilating raid by the Luftwaffe in August 1942. The ...”

“... a consistency proof of an axiomatic system for analysis. Whatever his philosophical views may have been at the time, his motivation had nothing to do with undermining logical positivism or formalism. To understand Gödel’s intervention, and the way Goldstein has misconstrued it, we need to take account of some more logical terminology. A formal ...”

“... of Butler’s discussion of performativity, Saba Mahmood draws on Butler’s Foucauldian point’ may be left forever unfinished by some readers, perhaps unfairly, as the sentence in its entirety usually makes sense and has some relevance to Yurchak’s argument. As the profusion of luminaries suggests (and my list is only partial), Yurchak is not writing ...”

“... There may be many readers who, on hearing of J.M. Coetzee’s Nobel Prize, immediately thought about the cost of clarity. There is so much, after all, missing from Coetzee’s distinguished books. His prose is precise, but blanched; in place of comedy there is only bitter irony (this is Coetzee’s large difference from Beckett, whom he so clearly admires); in place of society, with its domestic and familial affiliations, there is political society; and underfoot is often the tricky camber of allegory, insisting on pulling one’s step in certain directions ...”

“... it seems positively old-boyish, to say: ‘William James must have been quite a handful.’ And it may be that James’s justification of vivisection on the grounds that ‘a heroic dog’ would gladly make the sacrifice if he understood the excellence of the cause does a little more than make ‘a modern reader . . . uncomfortable’. To me it seems ...”