“... has moved into the vanguard of theoretical physics. He is one of a handful of people whose work may form the foundation of a ‘theory of everything’, a description of nature so fundamental yet so all-encompassing that it would be able to account for all the phenomena of the natural world. Scientists who know Hawking and work with him tend to protest that ...”

“... a touch Albanian, one modest academic salary devoted to the study of Manchu or classical Mongol may seem an outrageous expense when set against the need for more debt collectors and dole office clerks, and I would admit that there is a strong case for funding scholarship in the Pelliot and Ratchnevsky tradition only on a European Community-wide basis. Even ...”

“... Sutherland teaches psychology at the University of Sussex, but his early career as a journalist may have sensitised him to human irrationality. Thus he begins his tour of the psychological literature on irrationality with a discussion of the so-called ‘availability error’, a phenomenon particularly widespread in the media. This disposition, first ...”

“... to achieve’ or an indication of the ‘real opportunities you have regarding the life you may lead’. Issues of distribution, fairness and injustice are all ‘integral parts of the sense contemporaries had of capabilities and functionings’. The standards contemporaries could expect to enjoy were inevitably constrained by the war (not always ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... but a kind of apartheid routinely keeps them distinct. Towns, and the law administered from them, may generate ‘oases of Englishness’, but another Wales of poets, minstrels and prophets ‘apprenticed in ancient lore’ lies well beyond the English ken. Glyn Dŵr’s was a revolt of that Wales: a rising against law, in the name of lore. Fuelled and ...”

“... heroine hires the nanny merely because she wants to build an elaborate greenhouse on her property may be meant to sidestep the issue of working mothers, but this implausible plotting only makes the act of employing a surrogate seem all the more arbitrary and self-indulgent. Each time the camera lingers lovingly on another tasteful detail of the family’s ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... and is at once his strength and his handicap. His readers and the critics who judge his work may not understand it. Like Blanche Dubois, he will always have to rely on the kindness of strangers.There remains, theoretically it not actually, the alternative of first publication in the United States. It seems odd that America, traditionally hospitable to ...”

“... complex life. ‘By most estimates,’ Wallace-Wells writes, ‘at least ten times faster.’ We may not be at anything like end-Permian levels yet, but the parallels are clear. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) predicts that if emissions continue to rise at the current rate, the earth could experience as much as 4.5°C of warming by ...”

“... two reasons for this. First, he doesn’t truly believe that any rubbing out will be permanent. He may get banned for a year, but not for life. He may lose his wife, but not his kids. And anyway, there’s always another opportunity out there – another match, another team, another woman. Second, there are things he fears ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the issues they proposed, largely accounted for the reception of The Orators when it appeared in May 1932. By the end of that year, Louis MacNeice, Stephen Spender, Geoffrey Grigson, Michael Roberts, Bonamy Dobrée, John Hayward and Graham Greene had nominated Auden as the new voice. The six odes and the epilogue of The Orators, Greene said, justified ...”