“... of ending the Arab slave trade. Third, if they might not have been strictly justified, they may nonetheless have been excusable, usually because of Stanley’s sufferings, either on his expeditions (the fevers and so on) or because of his background. The ordeals of African exploration at this time were frightful – you were lucky if you returned with ...”

“... since a small selection was included in the prose collection In the Green Tree (1948): ‘It may be,’ Walter Allen wrote in the New Statesman, ‘that these letters will ultimately take a higher place than either the poetry or the stories for, like Keats’s, they point to a maturity beyond anything their author had been able to express in his ...”

“... first children, twin sons, were born in 1639; she was last pregnant in 1662, so her children may have frequented the schoolroom for rather more than twenty years; her translation of Lucretius could have taken her as long. Though she claimed to be ashamed of having defiled the streams of truth ‘with this Pagan mud’, she kept her translation by her and ...”

“... philosophy as such, by unravelling affirmative statements and propositions of all kinds. We may put this another way by saying that the two great bodies of post-philosophical thought, marked by the names of Marx and Freud, are better characterised as unities of theory and practice: that is to say that their practical component always interrupts the ...”

“... which is both the first and the weightiest of the long-term consequences. A single episode may be enough to make clear what this means. In answer to the demand that the proposed law instituting the CPE be withdrawn, the president of the Republic solemnly declared to the nation that he had decided both to promulgate the law and to ask that it not be ...”

“... way back to Neverland. We want to see him as pop’s greatest distortion of human nature, which he may be, but isn’t he also the most interesting person on the planet? Jackson’s mother, Katherine, a Jehovah’s Witness, has said that Michael never quite seemed like a child, that even in his nappies he ‘felt’ old. At little over a year and a half he ...”

“... for this sort of role. If they can give the appearance of aliveness and yet not disappoint, they may have an advantage over human beings as a kind of ‘spare part’, and open new possibilities for narcissistic experience with machines. From this point of view, relational artefacts make a certain amount of sense as successors to the always more resistant ...”

“... fresh honey narcotic properties. On the south Black Sea coast, the rhododendron flowers in late May and early June, and the route along which the mercenaries were marching would have been blocked by snow earlier in the year. That dates the episode to around the end of May 400 BC, but an analysis of the earlier books makes ...”

“... speaks that way for real when on trial is capable of committing all manner of nastiness? It may be only a short step from putting the boot into the English language when standing in the dock to being sent down for GBH. Lynda Mugglestone might have risked stretching her brief in Talking Proper to touch on dark possibilities of the kind Barthes raised in ...”

“... so on. The heart was missing, however: ‘the pericardium was open below & the heart absent.’ It may have been burned in the fireplace, which bore evidence of a ‘fire so large as to melt the spout off the kettle’. More probably it was taken away by the killer. This is another of Jack’s signatures: what is known in the lexicons of Ripperology as the ...”

“... who was UN deputy force commander in Rwanda at the time of the genocide. I met him in Khartoum in May this year, and asked what he thought of AMIS. ‘I got to Darfur in January 2005,’ he said. ‘I found out they were doing an incredibly good job. First, the rebel movements were still intact, so it was easy to deal with the government and the two rebel ...”

“... The fact that a person is physically near to us, so that we have personal contact with him, may make it more likely that we shall assist him, but this does not show that we ought to help him rather than another who happens to be further away. It is a troubling argument. What Singer says is almost impossible to argue with, but also very difficult to ...”

“... and often exhilarating. But knowing exactly the direction in which you want to push the form may not be the best way to change it in the longer term. It’s usually the hidden contraband in novels, rather than their overt aim, that sits and festers in the minds of its readers: mad, marginalised Bertha in Jane Eyre is the archetypal instance, where the ...”

“... as Barbara Wright’s otherwise excellent translation has it, ‘I’ve aged’. Zazie may have aged but the idea is more sententious than anything else she says, and she is more likely to mean she has just grown older. Time has passed, as time does. There is nothing you can do about it, and nothing has been done. Of course the perky gaze of the ...”

“... to death for treason, until Arundel stepped in and secured the man’s pardon. This affair may have been staged to show the king’s power and his mercy, but it’s clear that Arundel was managing a volatile monarch. When Richard asked to be anointed king a second time, with holy oil said to have been given to St Thomas Becket by the Virgin ...”