“... Margaret is mourning only for herself; just that she is mourning for herself, whatever else she may be mourning for as well, and however deep or shallow that mourning may be. We are always the subject of our own tears, but not the only subject; and knowing the many other reasons why we weep is a complicated affair, often ...”

“... a new conquest, just as it is an extraordinarily adept configuration of the field for those who may come to the subject weary from old failures to understand, or convinced that it is either marginal or obscure. What is strikingly original is that the five expositors, each of them a well-known expert in his field, have chosen to expound the central ...”

“... needed to understand were ‘the largely unspoken assumptions of the politically aware about what may or may not be done’. This ‘new constitutional history’, as it is sometimes called, has become the dominant academic paradigm for understanding medieval politics: historians now take it for granted that the ...”

“... Faulkner reread it every year. Joyce talked about its ‘unforgettable scenes … Madness, you may call it’ – but that was the secret of its ‘genius’. Philosophers were crazy for it too. Wittgenstein, who had read it ‘an extraordinary number of times’, went around quoting bits to friends. Heidegger kept a portrait of Dostoevsky on his ...”

“... The​ presidential election held in Turkey on 14 May was marked by heightened excitement, both among the domestic opposition and abroad, that the end of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s presidency might be imminent. Erdoğan and his supporters assured the country he was still the right man, at the right time – Doğru Zaman, Doğru Adam – to lead the republic into its second century ...”

“... of decisions made today, and there are good reasons to believe that the adoption of AI tools may be creating code that is harder to maintain and more likely to go wrong.Software engineering isn’t just about writing code. Over its complete lifespan much more time will be spent on debugging, updating and maintaining the code than was spent on its ...”

“... of history does not exempt him from repeating it. A more vivid proof, not mentioned by Butler, may be found in Ginsberg’s recent echoes of the totalitarian apologetics offered by some of the Modernists of the 1920s and 1930s. Ginsberg has placed his spiritual life in the care of a Tibetan guru (one consciously avoided by the Dalai Lama), the autocrat of ...”

“... tide. Marchand has immensely enlarged our knowledge of Byron the man, but some of the elucidations may be plunging critics of Byron the poet into further disarray. In a clutch of new studies of Byron, it is bound to be the biography that has it easiest. It is a story set glamorously among rich and famous people, and spiced with sex, scandal and more sex. Even ...”

“... he is full of fishy thinking and his charm and the charm of the subject is so great that you may easily be fooled ... so hang on to your brains.’ This is not a piece of advice that all the contributors to this volume have been willing to follow. And though this is compensated for by the distinction of many of the papers it is unfortunately true of ...”

“... that this is not an issue which I am strongly minded to open up at this stage,’ and ends with ‘may I reiterate’ thanks to me for chairing the 1991-93 Royal Commission on Criminal Justice (which is, I suppose, all the nicer since in fact it’s the first thanks I’ve had from him). He tells me to go and talk to John Wakeham, which I do. Wakeham is as ...”

“... 186 stanzas of the ‘Testament’ are interspersed with songs, letters and ballads, some of which may not belong; in these, the voice of resignation, of the angel succumbing to his fall, is at its clearest. So is the sense of loss. The Villon we hear, even in translation, is debarred from two cities – 15th-cenrury clerical Paris and the City of God, a ...”

“... made part of the personality, like a mask that grows onto the skin of your face. Such a reserve may well also express fear, both of the rituals of a class you detest and devote your life to undermining, and of the artificialities of the artists who secede from it. It is in any case very European, and has no American equivalent, even where writers like Henry ...”

“... void) maintain that British stability has little to do with the British electoral system and may rather be in spite of it. The first-past-the-post system, they insist, encourages a low turnout, because those who know their party can’t win in their constituency don’t participate, and this alienates them from the democratic process. A totally British ...”

“... second volume. It begins with a document concerning the first insurrection, in Sétif on 8 May 1945, and ends with the start of the war proper. The trouble in Sétif occurred when a procession led by Muslim boy-scouts, followed by women carrying placards demanding independence, clashed with some twenty gendarmes. In the ensuing violence, 27 Europeans ...”

“... with Adam’s plucking of the forbidden fruit and astutely observes that Augustine’s point may be that, like Adam, he was tempted by company. In another incident, Augustine describes his father’s pleasure at the baths when he sees his son naked, realises that he has emerged into manhood, and will himself be a father one day. Eager to counter ...”