“... such a culture, when it is officially sponsored by even the most benevolent and enlightened state, may easily serve to maintain a very non-utopian status quo. If there is an embarrassing absence of utopian imagination in a book that loudly decries the failure to think boldly about a different future, there is no dearth of attempts to do so in the recent ...”

“... both, but it’s not a politically motivated novel. The madness of the Cultural Revolution years may form a distinctive backcloth, but very firmly in the foreground is that familiar figure, the love triangle. As the title suggests, not very much happens in Waiting. Lin Kong, a medical officer in the People’s Liberation Army, is forced by his dying mother ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... in common, is, we now realise, ‘constructed’, ‘a product of culture’. Take nakedness. One may doubt whether early modern English men and women were ever naked. In the mid-17th century Quakers went ‘naked for a sign’, but they often turn out to have been wearing sackcloth coats – ‘naked’ here means without shoes, hats or outer garments. Men ...”

“... jockeying for position and saving face. Any idea of an authentic self becomes a nonsense. You may or may not believe in what you are performing; either type of performance is believed in or it is not. There is, as Goffman repeatedly says, no real reality. Still, you wonder, what is it then in either actor or audience ...”

“... to get ‘devilish angry’, which, the poem intimates, might do him some good. The setting may be a little different, but this is Beowulf reshot as ‘Grendel Strikes Back’, the harpist and hall forced to listen to a little demon music for a change. From Homer through Virgil and on, the descent to Hades has grown into a convention that has allowed ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... to tell. And although the book includes a general defence of the claim that individual expression may be regulated to serve deliberative democratic values, what he is willing to advocate is fairly innocuous, and of doubtful effect. US law has struggled with the question of how far to extend rights of speakers’ access to the public forum. The attempt to ...”

“... of multifaceted disagreement among the members of a large and fractious family. Specialists may occasionally even conclude that, in Lynch’s words, they are watching ‘sand-lot philosophy with pick-up teams’. But philosophy’s pros are hardly any closer to agreement on the issues at stake than they were a couple of millennia ago, and those issues ...”

“... loss and being run over by cars and off-road vehicles severely affect their numbers, the ravens may be a worse danger still. The birds have become what the wildlife biologist Michael Soule calls a ‘subsidised species’, meaning that they have a stable food source in garbage, as house-cats preying on songbirds do in cat food. Urban garbage dumps around ...”

“... the one with the most philosophical resonance. Marginal though Warhol’s film production may have been, he occupies a central place in motion picture discourse. It’s impossible to consider practitioners of cinéma vérité like Frederick Wiseman or provocateurs like Lars von Trier, the entirety of home video, porn, surveillance, webcams and reality ...”

“... that move turned out to be of no more use to the adults than their money had been – though it may well have saved their daughters from the attention of the Nazis and the local collaborators who soon appeared like another swarm all over France. The girls took shelter with the mother of their nanny; moving from one house to another, they survived the war ...”

“... Kurmanji, an illegal Kurdish dialect: ‘I shall struggle so that the Kurdish and Turkish people may live peacefully together in a democratic framework.’ MPs erupted with shouts of ‘separatist’, ‘terrorist’ and ‘arrest her.’ Parliamentary immunity saved her, for the time being. Over the next three years, Zana openly criticised the Turkish ...”

“... against the wet cobblestones’. Mrs S kneels and the matron catches her arm to steady her. It may be the first time they have touched. The novel is an accumulation of such scenes in escalating permutations, in the church, the corridor, the staffroom.At opposite ends of the social hierarchy, Mrs S (as wife to the headmaster) and the matron (as overseas ...”

“... you have to multiply 2 by itself three times (2 x 2 x 2) to reach 8. The usefulness of this may not seem immediately obvious, but the benefit of logarithms is that they allow you to transform multiplication and division into the simpler operations addition and subtraction. Imagine you want to multiply 8 by 16. If you express these numbers as ...”