“... ratios: go directly to the balance sheet, find the total equity and total assets, and divide. You may not find the exercise entirely reassuring.) Equity of less than – sometimes much less than – 5 per cent was in the case of many banks simply too little to allow them to absorb the losses incurred in the crisis. Between June 2007 and June 2009, the first ...”

“... mostly conducted in bracing seaside ozone. Talk of scooter-borne ‘vermin’ aside, the real fear may have had less to do with physical aggro and more to do with the difficulty of slotting Mod into any obvious class or subcult genealogy. (Even the word ‘subculture’ suggests soil, shadow, dirt; airless oubliettes; greasy rungs leading down into a Harry ...”

“... healthcare in Britain should be funded that personal hypocrisy is not much of an issue. Tony Blair may not be able to bring himself to educate his children in the comprehensive system that has to suffice for most parents, but when it comes to health he is happy to take his chances with the NHS (knowing, of course, that he will be well looked ...”

“... kind of noise – the sound of scholars breaking lances. Some of the likely murmurs of complaint may prove a bit churlish. Of course we should have preferred a novel, and a polished performance rather than one written as a family entertainment, and an original Austen work rather than one initiated by Richardson. Yet, if it had to be an adaptation, no work by ...”

“... mine in Anzin while researching for Germinal. Zola posed as an official to gain access, but there may be no mystery in getting people to talk. Taking an interest is all that’s needed.Price restricts the geographical and demographic reach of his narrative to the area around Lenox Avenue (also known as Malcolm X Boulevard), which runs north-south through ...”

“... recalls H.L. Mencken’s definition of Puritanism as ‘the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.’ He attacked Caroline Teddy Boys in his first tract against long hair; the second work was a sustained whine against drinking. He wrote the longest, if not the most weighty, attack on stage plays, defended the Sabbath and attacked ...”

“... uses and its presence is so much taken for granted as to be relatively benign. Though bad art may embody poshlost, its pretensions are usually harmless and recognisable: worse things happen when good art is taken up by poshlost, and has the kind of qualities which it can take over. When does this happen? Not with Mozart, with Shakespeare or with ...”

“... to believe that at least some rational processes are not local in either of these respects. It may be that wherever either semantic or global features of mental processes begin to make their presence felt, you reach the limits of what Turing’s kind of computational rationality is able to explain. As things stand, what’s beyond these limits is not a ...”

“... the aggressor? What might lead someone to seem passionately to covet what they most fear? We may be tempted to read the moment in Germany as the most cynical form of self-protection, but the later moment reminds us that the most inappropriate, seemingly irrational forms of behaviour can surface during a war. People can be calm when they should be ...”

“... and discharge this responsibility, Gelpi takes the task extremely seriously: Day Lewis’s poetry may have ‘fallen from notice or discussion’, but Gelpi is confident that his reassessment of his work, ‘will confirm his place as one of the major British poets of this century’. From the outset, readers of the book are left in little doubt that they are ...”

“... just not true! Ovid all bollocks. Would have been in love with me, had I lived in ancient Greece. May in fact have been referring to me in Wretched Tatty Papyrus Fragment No. 211 (Lobel-Page): Come [Terry?] … cast off your [air-cushioned?] Nikes the [?] nightingale [?] … Sappho of Lesbos has always seemed more phantasm than historical personage, of ...”

“... The bonobo is the best living example we have of a gynae-cocentric primate world. Gynaecocracy may not, however, be an idyllic affair. Rich spoke of ‘empowering joy’ between women, but Angier is more cautious. Bonobos ‘fight, and they’re hierarchical and greedy, and they can be murderous towards each other’. A whole chapter of Woman: An Intimate ...”

“... always another step worth taking away from the well-turned ornament. ‘Memory’ is undated. It may have been written before the ‘Last Poems’ of 1872, sometimes known as ‘New Poems’ or ‘Songs’, but this is where it has come to rest in the running order. It is a difficult, unaccommodating poem, despite the impartial courtesies of the 12-syllable ...”

“... insofar as it realises its absolute unity, then the pluralist is ‘willing to believe that there may ultimately never be an all-form at all, that the substance of reality may never get totally collected’. In short, in the pluralist’s view of things, all you ever have, or could want to have, is what James calls ‘the ...”

“... behind it, and with, what we need, more love than the other buildings, however sanctioned they may be under the latest laws. Within 15 years of McGahern’s essay, the power of the Church in Ireland has been fatally undermined. A number of reports into the abuse of children by members of the Catholic clergy have found that such abuse was widespread, at ...”