“... except in one sense. There is a long, old and dramatic human struggle against viruses. Hollywood may have smothered it in melodrama, but the enemy is real enough to draw virologists to the movie – Dorothy Crawford refers to it in her introduction – and to contribute to the brittle atmosphere of the Royal Society conference. It was like a meeting of ...”

“... And he may be thinking,’ we read in Berta Isla, Javier Marías’s last novel but one, published in Spanish in 2017, ‘that, basically, he belongs to the category of people who don’t see themselves as protagonists, not even of their own story … who discover halfway through that … their story will not merit being told by anyone, or only as a fleeting reference when recounting another person’s more eventful and interesting life ...”

“... and represented faithfully enough the main current of cultivated thought of their day.’That may, however, be a little too diminishing, or at least it fails to account for the journal’s novelty and impact. The periodical culture of the first half of the 19th century had been dominated by stately quarterlies, led by the Whig Edinburgh Review, founded in ...”

“... the critic as well as the biographer. They show how unlike temperaments of near-equivalent talent may be drawn together by unanimity of literary principle. This unanimity should therefore be worth looking into, especially in the case of work like Philip Larkin’s, always more reserved and elusive than it seems. I want to consider his writing in juxtaposition ...”

“... Chief Justice Kenyon said in relation to such a claim: ‘I do not mean to say that a stranger may not in any case prefer this sort of application; but he ought to come to the court with a very fair case in his hands.’ In 1835 the presiding judge of the Court of Exchequer added: ‘It has been the practice, which I hope never will be discontinued, for ...”

“... is a history of rule over the people rather than by the people. Representative democracy may not be government by the people either, but at least it aspires to be government for the people. It has become the ubiquitous expression of the modern democratic impetus. Sovereignty is pivotal in the attempt to reconcile democracy and representation. It too ...”

“... Mona except in terms of its late revelations, and these revelations are savage. The setting may be the insipid festival circuit of contemporary world literature, but the novel’s real subject is trauma and amnesia. Throughout, there are nervous tics, surges and refusals of memory. The book opens with Mona waking up from a blackout on a train ...”

“... court should refuse to entertain such a case and say it’s not constitutional business; but that may often be to leave standing an objectionable statute or an erroneous decision of a lower court. Instead, the US Supreme Court hangs its preferred solution on whatever constitutional peg it can find or devise. It was by this process, in the unsurprising absence ...”

“... Empires may rise and fall; Liberty and Slavery succeed alternately; Ignorance and Knowledge give place to each other; but the Cherry-tree will still remain in the Woods of Greece, Spain and Italy, and will never be affected by the Revolutions of Human Society.’ Hume may have been a bit too confident: in Eastern Europe the Revolutions of Human Society have been threatening even the cherry trees for years ...”

“... second instalment sets him off on what turns out to be an equally frustrated pursuit of power. It may seem curious that we are being asked to regard a man of such dazzling achievement as repeatedly failing in his aims, and at this stage we can only speculate about what he will be pursuing and not catching up with in Volume III. However that ...”

“... amatory and alcoholic excess. We never quite got the hang of each other, code-wise. I think he may have been disappointed at my failure to respond in kind with ‘Hey, ma MAN!’ or ‘You betchar-ASS!’, professional courtesies not often heard by the banks of the Trent. For my part, I had some difficulty in understanding his general observations on life ...”

“... through to a distinction, ‘but I wanted you to think it too.’ Potential readers, of course, may or may not be pleased that Burnyeat is making them do so much work – particularly as the dialogue’s parts increase in difficulty and the introduction’s discussion of options gets longer and more complex. He informs us ...”

“... and, therefore, leaves most of us not knowing quite where to look, how to say things. (Poets may help us with that.) In San Francisco, there are organisations for people who test HIV negative – to enable them to contribute, to feel less guilty about being ‘fit’. When I met Gunn there in 1989, the Bay Area Reporter, a give-away paper, had a dozen ...”

“... in books such as this one do no service to that history. Still, if these pictures do seduce, they may also impel the smitten to discover more about the object of desire. For the intellectually curious the footnotes are a more than adequate bibliography. Mr Platt, I believe, claims far too much. ‘Life-styles,’ he says in his Preface, are my subject, and ...”

“... of Hill’s prose. There is a further change from the earlier volume, suggesting that Hill may have responded to comments made by, among others, Eric Griffiths. In an essay included in Geoffrey Hill: Essays on his Work (1985, edited by Peter Robinson), Griffiths expressed reservations about Hill’s ‘unsteady reliance on religious metaphors’ in his ...”