“... possesses nuclear weapons, a blindspot that he was impolitic enough to reveal in front of Theresa May. But complaining about Trump’s ignorance and lack of curiosity is easy: what Bolton and his colleagues fail to do is to measure his strengths. Among them are his mastery of publicity and his ability to exploit the grey space between rules and ...”

“... case against Jonathan Franzen and his kind of big social novel did not look so watertight. There may be something too wised-up about these novels, but interest in large-scale fiction has not fallen off after the attacks. Writers quickly settled back into familiar tracks; in the introduction to his new collection of essays, How to Be Alone,* Franzen ...”

“... shadows walk the raisins and nuts – ultimately excludes even a willing reader, in a way which may not be programmatic, but is still effectively punitive. The frustration induced is different from the experience of reading Prynne, whose effortless perversity in switching the points of reference indicates an intriguing confidence in the game he is ...”

“... advance overlooked for so long? That Mendel published in German in a relatively obscure journal may have had something to do with it. Maybe he was out of sync with the era’s biological agenda: evolution was the hot topic, not the nuts and bolts of how characteristics were transmitted from parents to offspring. Maybe professional biologists disregarded ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the only civilian airport in the world wantonly destroyed since World War Two. Since last May Israeli F-16s (generously supplied by the US) have regularly bombed and strafed Palestinian towns and villages, Guernica style, destroying property and killing civilians and security officials (there is no Palestinian army, navy or air force to protect the ...”

“... there is information as to the mortality given for a few small centres, which may be trusted, and may serve as an approximate measure of the mortality in general.’ Medieval records are still being profitably mined for evidence of this kind. In Late Medieval Oxford (1992), W.J. Courtenay concluded that ...”

“... in 1956, in the midst of the Suez crisis, with only five followers in the House of Commons, he may have promised it a resurgent role in British politics; yet when he resigned, just over ten years later, it still had only 12 MPs and remained marginal rather than crucial to the making and unmaking of governments. He ...”

“... presidents of our countries, and even the wars we join in and the treaties we sign.’ As all this may suggest, Arab fiction is mostly political (and some would add that Arab politics is mostly based on fiction). The Syrian novelist Halim Barakat doesn’t allow for any choice in the matter: ‘Contemporary Arab writers have been preoccupied with themes of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... genres. True, Fahrenheit 451 seemed to prove that Science Fiction was outside his range: but there may have been personal strains on Truffaut then – including that of filming in England, with uneasy backing and a perhaps too-pat idea. Tirez sur le pianiste, his second full-length feature, had actually been enrichedby mixing slapstick, melodrama, romance and ...”

“... place beside the towel and the basin of water as an instrument of cleanliness or wholeness, and may therefore be regarded as an overt symbol of the Virgin’s purity.’ What Schapiro is doing here, by stressing the notion of an ‘overt symbol’, is to open our minds to the possibility that the alternatives are never simply either that objects are ...”

“... ensure that men are punished for their crimes, but since the punishment seldom comes quickly, and may fall not upon the guilty but upon their descendants, the resulting sequences of crime and punishment cannot often be perceived by human beings, so that the gods seem to men arbitrary and remote. Individual gods punish men who have refused them honour: thus ...”

“... ran it to death just to spite the Gentiles’. The picture of Namier which this scene discloses may appear entirely consonant with the resonances which ‘Namierism’ seems to have for those who have never read a word by or about the man himself: an animus against abstract ideas, sneers at intellectuals in politics, schadenfreude about the outcome of ...”

“... it merely seems to be asserting that the best journalism can be literature, and that a byline may be fleshed out into a participant. But its proponents do have one thing in common: a desire to have it both ways. They claim to be adding their imaginative insights to their reporter’s facts, to be moulding brute reality with artistry while never losing ...”