“... back the Corbyn tide. On 20 August alone, with his victory all but certain: ‘Corbyn has until May to prove himself, Labour MPs say’; ‘Dyab Abou Jahjah: the Arab “extremist” causing problems for Jeremy Corbyn’; ‘Corbyn has the vision, but his numbers don’t yet add up’; ‘Corbyn is no Trotskyist, Watson insists’; ‘Jeremy Corbyn and ...”

“... for world-weary intellectuals to register their protest by taking their own lives. He knows he may be turning a personal crisis into a political challenge, but in a world where the personal and the political are becoming hard to separate, he thinks his death can serve as ‘a signal, a challenge, an appeal’. During the war Mann had attempted to dream a ...”

“... So what was the relationship between the Olympians and all these other daemons and divinities who may or may not have had a place on the mountain? The knee-jerk response is that they were the principals in the pantheon. But in what sense was Ares a principal deity? Cults of Ares were neither very widespread nor very ...”

“... the dark net owes its origins in part to one of the US Defense Department’s research units. (One may be forgiven for thinking that the DoD is keeping afloat most of the theoretical and applied science and engineering departments on both coasts of the US. Apple is often credited with responsibility for game-changing innovations in mobile technology but in ...”

“... It’s May or June​ , the Cam is stuffed with expensive punts, which in turn are stuffed with moneyed tourists. A bunch of under-employed post-examinal students are dementedly heaving and levering away at one of the massive ornamental granite balls crowning the parapet of one of the college bridges. They’ve prised it loose, the entire river – the strollers and dawdlers and smoochers along the Backs, the rest of the shipping – seems to be watching in horror as it’s directly threatening a punt-load of Japanese tourists: the looming atrocity is of diplomatic, hemispheric, intercultural dimensions ...”

“... these two men have made is a carefully guarded refuge or a prison allowing no escape. Seclusion may have been a rational response in 1950s North Carolina: Wendell is aware of the prosecution of gay men, of the fact that he and Frank stand to lose a great deal if they are found out. But it’s frustrating that, in the novel, their isolation also has the ...”

“... of his collection to his second wife, Margaret. If the woman in the painting was Margaret, Robert may well have wanted to remove her. As for the dish that came afterwards, perhaps it just didn’t look right or was too strong a reminder of the family’s Civil War losses (they had also been forced to hand over much of their silver plate to the ...”

“... literary editor of the Spectator in 1958, he first commissioned reviews from him, adding: ‘I may have given the impression that Frank Kermode was new to the reading public when he started writing for the paper. That was not the case. He’d already made his name with his fine book, Romantic Image.’ Well, yes, he had in a sense made his name with that ...”

“... to become cosmopolitan citizens of the world (and therefore ‘citizens of nowhere’ as Theresa May would say); a theological fear that the children of God are becoming lost in the secular void (as Theresa May might say). It’s also a political intuition worth taking seriously. A people has to know itself as such if it ...”

“... Roland, while trying to make amends for withholding the truth about Lucy’s paternity. (It may be the only thing for which she has ever felt guilt.) She reads Roland’s diaries not to understand their fleeting romance, but for an insight into the man who imparted something of his character to the daughter she could not save.Lilia’s mixture of ...”

“... hindsight, to describe something that turned out badly as pure stupidity. But though decisions may transpire to have been incorrect, ‘in the moment they must have seemed correct’ – and that applies to both kings. Edward was not following a plan: he was running for his life, quite sensibly, being outnumbered and out of food, and Philippe was catching ...”

“... its realities. ‘To be in fantasy is to live “as if”,’ according to Denise Riley, but life may become intolerable when a metaphor collides with the facts.So love has a history. Does knowing that make it survivable? ‘In my view,’ Barbara Rosenwein writes, ‘knowing love’s history may also be – is – a kind ...”

“... with the devil’. In the years following there was a flood of accusations. When in May 1649 Sarah Edwards’s cow produced multicoloured milk, she and her husband were convinced that it had been bewitched by Hugh Parsons, the brickmaker whose wife, Mary, had been fined for accusing Marshfield. In February 1651 George Langton, a ...”

“... at a time when people seldom lived alone and lovers had few places to go. (Today’s rental crisis may be having the same effect. See, for reference, Eimear Walshe’s excellent video The Land Question: Where the Fuck Am I Supposed to Have Sex?) This spot, where Bloom watches Gerty, was at the end of Leahy Road in Sandymount. It is where, reputedly, on 16 June ...”

“... of Britain, or at least of London, in 1990, then one thing is obvious: some of his earlier heroes may have been angry and difficult, but now Uncle Kingsley is telling us he likes it here. For Amis to take as his protagonist a retired librarian, sensitive to the shades of his own and others’ feelings and with a strong sense of proper and improper uses of ...”