“... can be a synonym for ‘everything’ or it can denote the masculine sexual apparatus. You may think this kind of surveillance has nothing to do with enjoying Shakespeare but then for him the word ‘nothing’ could be the opposite of ‘something’ or denote the feminine sexual apparatus. Of course most English-made cabinets had a secret drawer. My ...”

“... and not the population as a whole being involved in their interpretation. These disadvantages may in any case be overstated. The laws after all are so old, centuries have worked on their interpretation, even their interpretation has in a sense become codified, and while there is surely room still for interpretation, it will be quite limited. Moreover, the ...”

“... the hand of history on my shoulder. I’d been at the first protest in that year of protests. In May, Godard and Truffaut led demonstrations at the Cannes Film Festival in support of what was happening in Paris. Les événements had begun. When I got back I edited the film we had shot. The BBC were confused. To the political programmes, it was a story about ...”

“... We are trying to restart the engines On wings of song. The pilot giggles posthumously – ‘You may kiss my hond,’ he drawls, for the last time Holding a hond out to be kissed from this page. (Sound of ...”

“... all be going We are in the north of the country And in the eastern part I forget which country It may come back to me, perhaps not What time does that make it You are asleep now, surely – I want you inside of me I beg your pardon Was that you What was that you said There are birds out there singing It is the depth of night What kind of birds sing at this ...”

“... unfortunately that’s a cliché these days, too. A more helpful way to think about cliché may be not as a category but a condition, not something that a phrase is but the way in which metaphor decays (and the brighter they burn, the faster they fade: temporary, like Achilles). Once upon a time, someone said ‘the brighter they burn, the faster they ...”

“... for the LRB in 1982. The one at the bottom of the second column was used for the cover of the 20 May issue. Brookner’s new novel, Providence, was reviewed by Robert Taubman along with four other novels, but his piece wasn’t advertised on the cover. The pictures must have been taken in Brookner’s office at the Courtauld: in a couple of them shelves of ...”

“... browser; in addition, the paper’s content becomes its own form of advertising. Another factor may be the length of the LRB’s articles: if you’re reading this online, your eyes are probably bleeding by now. So online works as a form of marketing without cannibalising the print circulation too much. That’s what seems to be ...”

“... Flaubert claimed to his friend Louis de Cormenin that he had translated Candide into English.) In May 1857, Flaubert wrote to Michel Lévy, the Parisian publisher of Madame Bovary, that ‘an English translation which fully satisfies me is being made under my eyes. If one is going to appear in England, I want it to be this one and not any other one.’ Five ...”

“... me forget about today until tomorrow’), and was first captured on a tape recording made in May of that year with the folk singer Eric von Schmidt at his home in Sarasota, Florida. Its first live performance was in London, at a Sunday afternoon concert at the Royal Festival Hall on 17 May. (Those were the days, when ...”

“... Delirium, senility, foolishness, idiosyncratic thinking: Aubrey Lewis has suggested that it may have been used in these ways as well. From the Ancients right through to the Enlightenment, paranoia has an undiscovered history. For reasons that can only be guessed at, it does not seem to have been a commonly used word, and Lewis suggests that its ...”

“... italics and exclamation-mark seem amply justified when he reports that from February to May 1945 there were on the Western Front ‘five hundred cases of convicted rape a month!’ But matters got worse after the ‘unconditional’ victory. The huge heists of jewels and bullion masterminded by US officers, though they were the biggest known thefts ...”

“... Russia’s appeal was doubtless what prompted Putin to set up the All-Russia People’s Front in May 2011, an exercise designed to broaden his electoral base by bringing in scores of pliant ‘civil society’ groups: business associations, trade unions, youth organisations, cultural funds, charities, sports clubs, even the National Union of Beekeepers. The ...”

“... from the awkward or irrelevant movements that conceal the manipulation of the cards, and it may mildly entertain and astonish you, as such a sleight-of-hand performance may.It’s not as if anyone, even her hardest-core fans, ever makes any claims for Christie as a writer per se. Her prose is flat and functional, her ...”

“... some extent) about their final presentation of that conception. By the end of this century Gramsci may well have replaced Machiavelli in the political Pantheon. But Gramscism will probably be as dubious a phenomenon as Machiavellianism has always been. Machiavelli’s ideas were, after all, kept in a sort of irrepressible life by the diabolical legend woven by ...”