“... was a ‘land of liberty’, though liberty for whom and from what is less clear – freedom may well seem less tangible in a Sports Direct warehouse.Tory politicians have been keen to emphasise that their policy has strictly followed the science, rather than being dictated by any other concern; one of the justifications for the extraordinary powers ...”

“... the late Roland Barthes, ‘through which all the sciences which we now call social and human may successfully be exercised.’4 Eating was one of Barthes’s own best topics: bleeding steak, sugar, photographs of food in Elle, the psychosociology of crispy food, Fourier’s fruit compotes.Un Festin en Paroles is a product of this profoundly Chinese ...”

“... kept her on the boards (against the advice of the majority of her critics) well into her fifties may be connected with a capacity to embarrass which often frays the edges of her writing.‘You can call me Colette’ isn’t a statement of the same order as ‘Call me Ishmael.’ The social limitations to experience in a woman’s life still preclude the ...”

“... sexuality to a mnemonic principle of classification by means of which ‘one man’s experience may be communicated to others, and the objects safely reasoned on while absent’. His system failed to achieve the dimensions of a philosophy, since it did not reveal the ‘constitutive nature and inner necessity of sex itself’. The Linnaean code, he ...”

“... on basic research with the vague promise of beneficial ‘spin-off’. However eloquently they may continue to preach the simple gospel of the untrammelled search for knowledge, they know in their own hearts that this is not a faith on which they can rely for their daily bread. This disillusionment was inevitable: yet it ...”

“... fact. For readers of a novel, the question ‘What is the gender affiliation of this narrator?’ may not seem particularly important. It certainly ranks much lower than ‘Do I want to go on reading?’ from which Sterling Karat Gold has nothing to fear.Maureen Duffy​ wrote two novels that play with gender ambiguity, Love Child (1971) and Londoners ...”

“... his oddly artificial project, since Andrade had never been to the Amazon. A few months later, in May 1927, he got his opportunity, when he joined Penteado on a three-month steamboat cruise. He imagined it would be a repeat of the 1924 trip to Minas Gerais, a raucous modernist party. Instead, it was just him, Penteado, her niece and one of her niece’s ...”

“... all others’. Life, he thinks, ‘tends to pour all beings into identical moulds’, and he, too, may be overcome. Perhaps Crayencour also gave the story to his daughter as a warning – one she heeded. In her seventies, Yourcenar said her father was ‘perhaps the freest man’ she had ever known.She had already surpassed her father’s rather thin theme in ...”

“... as superficial. Nothing, as Wilde added, is more superficial than thought. For women, who may be assaulted, imprisoned or killed because of what they do or do not wear, clothes may be a matter of life or death. Anne Higonnet’s new book is somewhat belied by its subtitle, which plays to the idea of fashion as ...”

“... in the West sees it as a cautionary tale.An effort to rehabilitate the memory of the war may therefore seem to have a certain romantic quality. A former CIA officer enlisted in the war effort, Paul Miller is one of the few US officials of that period who focused his career on Afghanistan. From the CIA he made his way to the staff of Douglas ...”

“... for the law or the church, but he doesn’t seem to have pursued any particular career. Illness may have checked his ambition: bladder stones left him in a ‘condition of constant and dangerous and most painfull sickness’. Later he would recall that not a single moment of his youth had been without pain. Yet when the diary begins, he’s exultant. The ...”

“... cassettes in his cab and plasters the interior with coloured stickers containing the name of God may be pious – but not strenuously so. Islam is part of his lifestyle, but not the key to his identity. Islam and Arabism merge imperceptibly into one another. Although the two may conflict at the intellectual and political ...”

“... suggests: it is to establish in the only way possible that there is a major classic, which may be suitably called Gwendolen Harleth, hidden from the general recognition it deserves in the voluminous mixed work that George Eliot published – a classic it is incumbent on us to reclaim for English literature. It is Gwendolen Harleth who represents the ...”

“... In Marlowe’s Edward II, the royal favourite Gaveston plans delicious entertainments which ‘may draw the pliant king which way I please’. He will introduce musicians to the court, ‘wanton poets’, Italian masques by night, and ‘pleasing shows’. Edward, walking abroad, is to encounter pages dressed as ‘sylvan nymphs’, and Sometime a lovely boy in Dian’s shape With hair that gilds the water as it glides, Crownets of pearl about his naked arms, And in his sportful hands an olive tree, To hide those parts which men delight to see, Shall bathe him in a spring ...”

“... after 1918. ‘Not a great picture,’ Tomkins says of Nude; and Seigel remarks that ‘there may not be many people today who prefer Duchamp’s work to that of, say, Picasso or Matisse – nor should there be.’ It’s true that Nude has become one of the great clichés of Modernism, and a fashionable restaurant in Philadelphia has based its whole ...”