“... and neither have authoritarian leaders. When Bill Gates suggested that large public gatherings may be wiped out for the foreseeable future, Viktor Orbán, Binyamin Netanyahu and Narendra Modi must have been smiling. ‘We heard the sirens of the Palestinian security forces wailing away,’ a friend in Ramallah wrote to me, ‘and I thought they must be ...”

“... wrote so eloquently. He gave a cautious reply: ‘I think they probably had very bad breath.’ He may have been right about that, but it would be wrong to infer that this was something which didn’t bother them. The men and women of the Middle Ages may have had a greater aversion to unpleasant body odours than their ...”

“... scrunching their way through riverside alder and willow in Perth city centre, for example. In May 2019, the Scottish government recognised beavers as a protected species, meaning that any farmer seeking to control numbers has to apply for a NatureScot licence. The old guard used this legislation to fight back: 87 animals had been shot under licence before ...”

“... parvenu-like braggart with power, and the vain self-reflection in the feeling of power’. Johnson may be in it for the posh banquets and Churchillian photos, but the consequences are far, far weightier. It is because he is so uninterested in consequences that he has delegated so much power to his chief strategist. Dominic Cummings has become an object of ...”

“... for ‘no reading is, or should desire to be, innocent of political involvement.’Lentricchia may here have reached one of those limits with which, on Fish’s view, every theory eventually collides: for to learn a whole new set of terms and assumptions only to discover that by doing so your text ends up where every poem, indeed every piece of ...”

“... is not jarring polemical judgments but the breathtaking architecture of the whole. His style may be a marvel of burnished rhetoric, shimmering with insight and intelligence, but it also lacks a political cutting edge. There may even be a sense in which this totality is Jameson’s personal utopian alternative to the ...”

“... wife, what a terrific president he’s been for most of his first 16 months in office. Modesty may not be among his many virtues, but then ‘no one in this town is modest,’ and he is, as he constantly reminds people, the president of the United States of America. As the novel opens, he’s really up against it. The time is more or less now – or, to be ...”

“... looking for a place to inject, or homeless people wanting shelter, or gay men meeting for sex – may use a park’s toilets as well as middle-class mothers. ‘Providing bathrooms means welcoming the world,’ Lowe writes. But ‘keeping some out is most easily achieved by keeping everyone out.’ The book flits between historical accounts of the rise and ...”

“... over, and repainted so many times that it looks simultaneously new and old.’ The anonymous buyer may have sought out a trophy, but in critical terms, he’d bought a lemon. What was notable was the painting’s trajectory through the museums, storage facilities and offshore trusts that facilitate the machinations at the upper end of the art market before it ...”

“... to his wife ‘by water to Buenos Aires, then westward overland for hundreds of leagues’. This may place him in Di Benedetto’s Mendoza. The time isn’t quite right, though. Don Diego is living in the last years of the 18th century. Of course he doesn’t know, as the author and the reader do, that the very empire that is meant to control Don Diego’s ...”

“... her son, the authorYou too, my mother read my rhymes  For love of unforgotten times‘And you may chance to hear once more  The little feet along the floor.’R.L.S.The showdown came when Mrs Auden discovered a ‘suggestive’ poem of Auden’s about Medley, as seen in the school swimming pool. George was assigned to lecture both boys on the proper ...”

“... now be self-conscious, deliberate dives into the sublime banal. Nowadays a novelist’s characters may themselves be knowingly aware of the effects of place. Swift’s new novel returns to the South-West London of his first two books. It is set in Wimbledon, but ventures, if that is the word, to Putney, to Hammersmith, to Chislehurst, even to Broadstairs. His ...”

“... scandalous and always controversial focus on sexuality and the socially constructed body to what may be an equally controversial concentration on spirituality and biological drives and affects. This is worthwhile because to many involved in literary studies, especially in feminism and queer theory, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s career seems to provide not only a ...”

“... The list could go on, and on. And it does. The chapters dated 500 AD (After Dave) may have been great fun to write, but the future is always hard to read. The jokes pall; the exposition becomes first oppressive, then boring; and, structurally, by dividing the novel in two and having both parts running alternately (a chapter about the Hamsters ...”

“... is something like: ‘I will fight and, if need be, lay down my life for a Bill of Rights that may have this implication.’ A more troubling reading, however, is that Nazi speech is worth protecting even if a consequence of that protection is that someone gets hurt or killed. ‘I will defend your right to say it, even if your saying it makes violence ...”