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“... for a late and largely undetected Labour surge in the run-up to the 2017 general election, Theresa May might now be steering us through the Covid-19 crisis: trusted, sensible and reliable, however costively unimaginative and incapable of the nimble feats of very un-Conservative gymnastics so far performed by Boris Johnson’s chancellor, Rishi Sunak. And ...”

“... one of many controversial, not to say fateful, judgments made by the prime minister last year. In May, with infections and hospitalisations falling, political pressure began mounting for a relaxation of lockdown restrictions, not least in order to distract attention from the row that broke out at the end of that month over Dominic Cummings’s drive to ...”

“... to a hostile cosmos results in your inevitable destruction, so sending messages into space may be something no sensible civilisation would do. If so, we may come to regret the 2008 advert for Doritos transmitted by one of the most powerful radar systems on the planet towards a star in the constellation of Ursa ...”

“... Recent comparisons of the Hellenistic Age with our own fragmented culture may have persuaded at least some curious readers to dip into Theocritus, Polybius or Apollonius Rhodius. Yet how many have so much as heard of Callimachus? The books discussed here are by serious scholars; they require, between them, an investment of some £450, and comprise a total of more than two thousand pages – at a generous estimate, one page for every intact surviving line of the author they discuss ...”

“... the Turkish army across the frontier. If another PKK attack of similar magnitude takes place, he may be compelled to act. The PKK headquarters are in the Kandil mountains, which run along the Iraqi side of the border with Iran. They form one of the world’s great natural fortresses. The mountains, which will soon be covered in snow, are broken by deep ...”

“... that provide clues and proceed, with varying degrees of caution, to do some invention. The story may then become so complicated that even reasonably sober academic biographers have to alter the whole shape of the early career to accommodate their guesses. When the fiction is provided by someone whose business is precisely the writing of fiction the invention ...”

“... and Middlesex. Mercia was, Adams claims, ‘the crucible of the English state’. The West Saxons may have promoted their version of the national story more successfully, but it is salutary to remember that if things had gone differently, the capital of England might be Tamworth (which has a population today of about eighty thousand), with its senior ...”

“... would not occur to most viewers today, yet there was a streak of lewdness in Rembrandt which may make us hesitate to reject it. Velásquez’s woman may not be a goddess, but she is nude, not naked. Her pose is irreconcilable with the efficient performance of the act in question and her grace is hardly compatible with ...”

“... once a month her characters acquire sexual characteristics, but at random – an individual may be male one month and female the next. Why do we have sex at all? There is so much of it about, and we take it so much for granted, that only a child, or an evolutionary biologist, would think of asking the question. And it turns out that sex is a very big ...”

“... patient child. The theory’s fine, but in practice there would be great gaps in the sequence. It may be that all those games and tricks demanding superhuman patience, all those artefacts with tabs and slots and letters of the alphabet, requiring glue and paste and three right hands, all those infant pastimes which allegedly were easy enough for a previous ...”

“... The proof of a theory may lie in its application, but application means very different things in different corners of the universe of the mind. Expecting an eclipse of the sun at a certain time and place, and for a certain duration, is one kind of application. Producing a silicon chip which programmes certain operations is another kind ...”

“... be the same something that they are, also hold that identity is relative. They think that a and b may coincide under the concept f, yet fail to coincide under some other concept g. For instance, I am the same person as won such and such a prize at school over fifty years ago, but not the same boy, for I am no longer a boy. Or again, the river in which I swam ...”

“... states – Yugoslavia, East Germany, the Soviet Union – are unable to survive its coming. This may be the year in which we see whether South Africa is one of those that can. With the launching of Codesa – the Convention for a Democratic South Africa, whose first plenary session was held on 20-21 December – the march towards a democratic, non-racial ...”

“... other learned historians look illiterate beside him. Though not a great lover of footnotes, which may still in his day have seemed a shade ungentlemanly, he used them, as ‘a necessary evil’, to support his historical narrative and to confound his contemporaries: but it turns out that even he exaggerated his acquaintance with primary archives. Anyway, he ...”

“... he has found; the next two volumes will be about attitudes to suicide: damning in the sources we may call official (The Curse on Self-Murder); complicated, we are to understand, in the more inward commentary of ‘medieval psychologists, poets and pastors’. The last volume will be called The Mapping of Mental Desolation, which sounds gloomy enough, but ...”