“... the same as it always was. By attempting to swallow Ukip whole and ingest its voters, Theresa May is banking on a similar attitude from Brexit supporters: that their insistence on the forms and legalities of British independence from the foreign usurpers of Brussels will be matched by a willingness to overlook the extent to which Britain has become a ...”

“... she’ll be, what, eight months old now? Mitchell’s face freezes, looks briefly as though it may never move again. Then he returns to an imitation of normality. Hoover has a question about the little girl, or about her future incarnation. ‘What will you do when she brings home a negro?’ Mitchell doesn’t have an answer to the question, and perhaps ...”

“... In February, the price of coated papers was up 78 per cent from last year. The manufacturers may have wanted higher prices, but dramatic hikes are bad for the industry’s stability as well as for buyers. Other industries are affected too. Supplies of label substrate – the shiny material from which you peel labels – are depleting, which could affect ...”

“... In​ the second week of May, a man climbed up a ladder and unscrewed a street sign on Moskovsky Prospekt, the longest street in Kharkiv. To cheers and whoops, his co-conspirator dumped the faded blue sign in a bin, and they pasted a replacement onto the chipboard covering a shattered window. The new sign read ‘G ...”

“... The past is in front of you: what happened there, or some of it, can be seen. Events on one strand may affect the others, and not in a linear way but in a direct one. Future and past generations are fully alive in Andean time, living on in their times as equally and immediately as you do in yours. Things and places can move between streams, or can be present ...”

“... Grey’s miscalculations about Reform in the 1790s turned out well in the long run. The same may be true of the 1980s. The young aspirants who have pinned their hopes to the SLD and electoral reform may include the Charles Grey of a great enactment in 2032. According to the polls, nearly half of Britain’s electors ...”

“... conveys the relish unmistakably; and though it’s what gives the stanza its poetic energy, we may surely find it sinister. For we know from elsewhere that ‘hatred engendered by religious strife’ was by no means foreign to Milton’s temperament. Is it foreign to Christopher Hill’s? I’d say it is, for his tone in this collection of essays is, for ...”

“... to say things to. To sit nearer the window, in patches of silence, wondering what, if anything, may still be done to help. Why, it is even possible to smile at each other briefly; while music plays, and life pretends to be ordinary. 5. I remember her singing this very song, decades ago. One of the reasons, of course, why I bought her this tape. How happy ...”

“... embraced a principle which he did not subsequently abandon,’ but also to add that his works ‘may always be advantageously referred to as furnishing materials for speculation’. His readiness to change his mind was, in his lifetime, his weakness and is in retrospect his strength. It is the justification of a major biography. The initial Essay on ...”

“... shabby universe reeking of the small screen and a low budget. But then what else would we want? It may be that this all seems so authentic only in the light of the gloss and spaciousness of the new film; but even so, the seediness works, as does the leisurely pace of the series, and I found myself wondering whether television as a medium, a set of small square ...”

“... crime that has shocked the whole of Germany’), a story about the star of a TV dance show who may have a new lover, as well as a ‘quote of the day’ from Lorca (‘Wasting time is a terrible thing’). There is no mention of the eurozone crisis on the front page, or anywhere else in the paper, except for the two items on page two. The biggest domestic ...”

“... in Benghazi against Ansar al-Sharia – the group accused of the attack on the US Consulate – may seem to offer hope, but it will take a lot more than one popular protest against one Islamist militia to rescue Libya from this catastrophic condition. Obama made a calamitous wrong call in endorsing the Nato intervention in March 2011. His defence secretary ...”

“... is barely hinted at in the briefing documents, but the implication is that the metaphor repository may provide the clue to understanding the hidden aims of different factions where some dispute is involved. What would it tell us if it turned out that encoded in the very language of the Iranian people is the concept that LIFE IS A BLAST? Unfortunately, it ...”

“... of the Belgian painter’s work at Bozar, the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels (until 8 May) – Tuymans based the painting on a photograph taken by a surveillance camera.*The process, Rugoff explains, is one of ‘translating this covert picture of a closed, members only area.’ That sounds familiar. Commentaries on contemporary art often ...”

“... Three former students interviewed for the PBS documentary College Inc., first broadcast in May last year, were handed nursing diplomas without having set foot in a hospital. A student talked into studying for a doctorate in psychology discovered when it was time to ‘graduate’ that her cybercollege only ‘aspired’ to the accreditation needed to ...”