“... This seems doubtful – or at least, it seems doubtful that the statement means very much. He may have a liking for pastiche and unreliable narrators, but his world is old-fashionedly solid. Think of his real concerns: the past is irrecoverable; the present is not necessarily an improvement on what went before; your wife might be cheating on you. Great ...”

“... its intricate constitution and federal structure, presided over by the Grand Lodge. British clubs may have seemed obsessed with petty regulations and schoolboy ceremonial – all those silly hats, weird initiation rites, secret oaths and queer titles, ballots and blackballs, to say nothing of arcane toasts, songs, drinking customs and fines – but these ...”

“... desire for unattainable precision and curious universal truths is also a Romantic trait, and it may be that some of the more ambitious forms of modern literary criticism will come to be seen as a late flowering of the Romantic spirit. When the various definitions are brought together, they tend to suggest that the Romantics were writers and artists who knew ...”

“... continued through subsequent Administrations, and now it seems that the necessary technology may soon be within reach. George W. Bush wants to push ahead with the scheme, and has committed the US to constructing a National Missile Defense system, at a cost of more than $60 billion. A successful test was carried out in July. Canada’s co-operation is ...”

“... 1942 Poems. Such tellingly symbolic moments are few and far between. Biographers, though, may well get something out of Berryman’s early struggles to decide what he should call himself. Many of the books listed here were acquired in the Thirties, and it was Berryman’s habit then to sign the books he owned or to paste into them a bookplate. Hence ...”

“... with close-cropped blond hair and he was wearing a white shirt and khaki trousers. To an Iraqi he may have looked as if he were working for the CPA. As he stood in a crowd outside the museum a man walked up behind him and shot him in the back of the head, killing him instantly. There are 55,000 US troops in and around Baghdad but they seem curiously ...”

“... or carelessness, can embellish a work or deface it. In crass economic terms, writing in a book may decrease its value (Jackson had to rummage through library sale rejects to find specimens of late 20th-century textbooks marked in fluorescent highlighter) or multiply it exponentially (when the annotator happens to be Galileo or Nelson Mandela). Marginalia ...”

“... here – ‘entertain’ might be more appropriate. For Donoghue’s Stevens it is ‘as if’ I may entertain the fiction that it’s sunny outside when it’s raining; but exquisite as my conviction may be, I’m still getting wet. Then again, it’s ‘as if’ I’m really still dry. None of which seems to me to refute ...”

“... we simply go from one death to another in this book, since death is all there is, so to speak, we may get the impression that Derrida is a perpetual mourner, scarcely engaged in anything apart from expressing and failing to express his grief. And yet the occasions are spaced over time in a way their proximity on the page quite belies – Barthes died in ...”

“... but Penguin’s decision to publish a translation has done wonders for its reputation. It may not figure on their classics list, as Mai Jia modestly admitted to Chinese journalists, but he joins the sequence of distinguished Chinese authors Penguin has published in the last ten years, including Qian Zhongshu, Lu Xun and Eileen Chang. All the same, if ...”

“... the jurisdiction to prosecute Israeli war crimes committed in the conflict. But ICC membership may not be the panacea that some believe it to be. Even if the court overcame the obstacles to bringing a case, it still might not be able to deliver Israeli suspects to the dock. In the short term, the real value of an ICC case to Palestinians would be the ...”

“... filthy and tragic, the Life offers precious testimony to what ancient Greek popular narrative may have looked like. Kurke’s learned and humane book aims to excavate the vibrant popular tradition assumed by Aesop’s fables but now largely buried, and restore it to its place in cultural history. The largely elite literature that survives from ...”

“... east. As D.H. Lawrence wrote in his 1920 foreword to Women in Love, ‘the bitterness of the war may be taken for granted in the characters’: Lawrence’s novel says even less about war and warfare than Radiguet’s, but both books describe worlds of sex and violence that exist in the shadow of some greater cataclysm. As the narrator’s passion for Marthe ...”

“... the logic of ambition, division, decay and transformation that marks all such associations. This may seem obvious, but in some studies of the Brotherhood, it is depicted as sui generis because the ideas to which it adheres are Islamic. Others have characterised it as anti-systemic, opposed not only to representative government but to the very framework of ...”

“... junta. The assistant secretary of state, Kurt Campbell, met senior representatives of the junta in May, and last autumn Obama himself took part in a regional summit at which Burmese leaders were present. ‘We are saying to the junta that we are open to dealing with them, no matter what’s happened in the past,’ an official said. The EU and Australia have ...”