“... the work and the home life of Buchan fisherfolk and railwaymen are beautifully detailed, and by no means all smoothed by the amber varnish of an affectionately-remembered seedtime. The root of his radicalism is incarnate in the station clerk who shared a shack with a shunter which they called ‘Utopia’. He read Shaw, Wells and Russell, and stopped saluting ...”

“... having reduced spirit merely to ‘intelligence’, i.e. instrumental, calculative reasoning about means instead of ends), shows that a noted scholar like Beda Allemann is just wrong to say that ‘spirit is one of those words which Heidegger only uses in quotation marks after Being and Time.’ But to suggest bad faith on Heidegger’s part here would seem an ...”

“... at in one reading is likely to become unbalanced in the next, and re-established only by other means. What would stop the will to read, especially in the case of philosophy, is the discovery of the text’s final undecidability or unintelligibility. If I understand Hartman correctly, he is right to think that reading will continue only so long as it trusts ...”

“... that far too many Americans carry, and which is a symptom of the same faith in violence as a means of social control. Few white Americans remember their names, but few black Americans – and no black parents with sons – have forgotten them: Trayvon Martin, a 17-year-old in Florida killed by a ‘neighbourhood watch volunteer’ who claimed to be ...”

“... to define it in terms favourable to themselves. This isn’t a disturbing fact – it’s what it means to act politically – but it isn’t a neutral one either. Behind that wall of appealing rhetoric, there is bustling activity: something is being constructed.To point out that ‘the centre’ – as a proclaimed area of shared, sensible assumptions about ...”

“... his latest book, like some of its predecessors, is as odd as it is learned. It begins, but by no means ends, with a minute enquiry into the expression in medias res. Horace observed that Homer, instead of starting his poem about the Trojan War from the beginning – ab ovo, Leda’s egg from which was hatched Helen of Troy – chose to rush his listeners ...”

“... as individuals. Their attributes, too, share this expressive register, rendered with minimal means: a characteristic hat, an umbrella, a necklace. ‘Trompe l’oeil Crucifix’ (1812) Boilly’s attention to textures and surfaces is remarkable. Fabrics crackle and shimmer. Fishbowls, telescopes and apples catch and reflect light. A bug-eyed child ...”

“... the scenes in which she takes part: in that sense, what she sees tends to be atypical. It is by no means an irrelevant factor that, in so far as her personality emerges from the notes, she seems friendly but shrewd, always prepared to like people and to enjoy herself but not to the detriment of her alertness. Although she hasn’t come looking for bad ...”

“... just before the birth of the state described in Norman Rose’s ‘A Senseless, Squalid War’ and David Cesarani’s Major Farran’s Hat. Both books deal with the last years of the Mandate, when the rightist nationalists of the Irgun and the Stern Gang waged a fierce campaign against British forces and the Arab population, provoking an increasingly harsh and ...”

“... schooled the mujahidin warlords as well as Mullah Omar and his Taliban colleagues. Whether this means they are more radical than the previous generation is unclear. Coghlan quotes a Taliban cleric near Lashkar Gah in Helmand in March 2008 as saying: ‘These new crazy guys are really emotional. They are war-addicted.’ Recent reports suggest that most ...”

“... Eurosceptic ministers and former ministers, such as Iain Duncan Smith, Nigel Lawson and David Owen. Then there’s Grassroots Out, which was supposed to bring the other two lots together. But the prospectus on offer has been muddied because the spokesmen within each organisation have had different ideas. Johnson in particular changes his ideas once ...”

“... parties. The key portfolios in the new government went to the members of Shamir’s Likud Party. David Levy, a populist of Moroccan origins, became Foreign Minister. Mr Levy does not speak English. But since little more than a dialogue of the deaf with the United States was likely on the peace process, this was not considered a severe handicap. Moshe ...”

“... as the image of time and the tale. George Mackay Brown is as firmly in control of his linguistic means as any Formalist could desire. When he draws our attention to the perilous condition of metaphor, he might almost be echoing Viktor Shklovsky’s convictions, explosively communicated in ‘The Resurrection of the Word’ (1914). Shklovsky laments: ‘The ...”

“... of view of the individual worker, scrambling up the ladder even as it’s being pulled away, this means that the traditional 20th-century strategies for economic advancement – education, working hard, fighting for promotion – no longer make sense. ‘The trend within white-collar work is for more lower-level service work, as in retail sales and in ...”

“... to City Limits as part of a strategy to get herself a job at the Guardian, then in the designer David Hillman’s font-butting, G2-adding incarnation: she loved the Guardian intimately, like a lover, the way it cropped its pictures, its Garamond and Helvetica and heavy rules. I, on the other hand, was completely clueless. Between Deborah and Nick ...”