“... reduce the devout life to moralising calculation and safe asceticism’. A string of other shifts may be mooted: the emergence as a distinctive Jesuit characteristic of systematic hostility to all forms of Protestantism, which had not been in the original brief; the passage from the intellectual anti-humanism promoted by Ignatius in Paris to the classical ...”

“... are smiling waitresses, not seen-it-all barkeeps; its anonymous New York voices say ‘yes-how-may-I help-you?’ not ‘how you doin’?’; its background noise is the hiss of espresso machines. If you don’t catch a ride to the Hamptons with your father-in-law in his chopper you must endure the discomforts of the Hampton Jitney. The novel’s frequent ...”

“... a youngish English archaeologist, digging in Mesopotamia in the spring of 1914, thinks he may have discovered evidence that would definitively resolve a number of uncertainties in the history of the late Assyrian Empire. Since those uncertainties are still unresolved more than 90 years later – no one knows whether or not King Sinsharishkun survived ...”

“... had a knack of making you feel that the thing that might be done could only be done by you. ‘You may be so far ahead with Goldsmith that this book about Swift would not fit well,’ says the typewritten note in the last book he sent me, ‘but it might be mentioned. Goldsmith and Grub Street, then and now, does seem a subject in need of your ...”

“... I am the one who gets up first in the morning and feeds her before opening the kitchen door she may think I am her primary caretaker, if that is the phrase, and therefore her owner. And it is my bed that the cat comes to at night, after hunting, and she curls up under the sheets between my knees. It is strange to have her there, but I believe she used to ...”

“... of the 1980s. (There’s no simple way of saying exactly what a given level of the VIX means. You may remember from school that a ‘standard deviation’ measures the amount by which, in aggregate, a characteristic such as people’s height varies from its average. The VIX is a sort of standard deviation, modified for the particularities of finance, and ...”

“... oblige her in memory of all her great goodness to us – when it did make such a difference – of May 1910.’ He was referring to the death of his brother William. He then told Alice that Mrs Swynnerton was ‘doing – finishing – the portrait of me that she pushed on so last year’. Doing, finishing, pushed – James isn’t pleased with the ...”

“... or a warped reflection of the real, or a reflection of a reflection of the real; and all of it may or may not refer, however obliquely, to the world outside the novel, a world in which its author is an acclaimed creator of warped realities. It recalls all the conventions of the genre only to subvert them.The first and ...”

“... same and also different. To adult children who have not yet needed to care for their parents, or may never, lucky dogs, this may be a cautionary tale.’ ‘Diagnosis is everything,’ she tells us at the outset. Her advice? Challenge doctors: ‘Doctors are not gods, though some act that way. Some hate being ...”

“... horizon, but the man is looking the other way and it doesn’t seem likely it will save him. Homer may have added it later to appease viewers who found the painting too bleak.The bottom third of the picture is taken up with a great wave, teeming with sharks. One swims towards us, its open mouth angled almost past the picture plane, while another appears to be ...”

“... to deal with miscarriages of justice. It noted the criticism of the Home Office made by Sir John May, who led an inquiry into the cases of the Guildford Four and also the Maguire Seven, whose convictions were quashed in June 1991. May wrote that the Home Office’s ‘approach … was throughout reactive, it was never ...”

“... create a background of deliberate spatial confusion. A partial explanation for this development may be competitive divergence: Donatello was driven to devise original solutions by the success of the older Lorenzo Ghiberti, whose mastery of linear perspective in relief sculpture could never be surpassed. But there can be little doubt that Donatello also came ...”

“... either in the country to which removal is to be effected or in any country to which the person may subsequently be removed’. In 1994 the UN high commissioner for refugees found the principle of non-refoulement to be part of customary international law, the universal law that binds all states irrespective of treaty obligations, observing that states ...”

“... of the imagination which created it, though a reader familiar with Pester’s short stories may have some suspicions. The title story of Am I in the Right Place? (2020) features a ‘Mondelux single-man-in-a-bedsit oven with rotisserie setting’ that turns out to be a portal to childhood memories. In ‘Lifelong Learning’, from the same collection, a ...”