“... The dispute is conducted in the languages of theology, jurisprudence, humanism and philosophy, and may be said to have been held together by a concept of ‘the political’ sufficiently coherent and idiosyncratically Latin and Western to raise the question whether ‘political thought’ can be held to exist in the culture of other civilisations without ...”

“... the novella; and in the second story the men who make Raymond watch the cremation of Kim’s body may be dark angels, or minor devils, or simply crematorium workers with some knowledge of the dead girl. The epigraph is Rilke’s: ‘Every angel is terrible.’ The central figure of ‘Cosmo Cosmolino’, Janet, was young in the early Seventies: one of those ...”

“... should spend, what they should read and what they should watch. Latterday members of this élite may have been true to their Victorian forebears in exacting duty from themselves and deference from others, but both of these attitudes now stuck in the gullet of Essex Man. The policies of the Eighties were intended to strip them of their cultural authority, and ...”

“... awe they cast behind them. Pavlov stressed that conditioning could be anticipatory, that the dog may salivate on the expectation rather than the stimulus of bell or food – and this implies far more active, spontaneously active, processes than reflex arcs. This book describes Pavlov’s background, though we learn little of his personal life, beyond his ...”

“... There is one leading character, a male. His fortunes vary so extremely and abruptly that he may not be recognised in one phase of life by friends and relatives from another. At times he enjoys great privilege and authority, but at other times his liberty is severely restricted and his mind and will may be ...”

“... Both are skilled in the use of stock characters, people who seem familiar, so that we may guess how they will respond to events – guess, not predict, for Archer and Raven are acquainted with the least-likely-person technique. Both add credibility by making use of their personal acquaintance with well-known politicians: but they have different ...”

“... Carel van Mander in 1603, the earliest account of Caravaggio’s art that is known to us, we may deduce that Caravaggio was the first European artist who ostentatiously disdained invention and the ideal. He adhered instead to an artistic purpose that can only be called realist with a defiance which anticipated the attitudes of those 19th-century painters ...”

“... over her recently-acquired fiancé, who has unaccountably disappeared for some weeks and so may well be dead. It takes Holmes a couple of days to show that he is still alive and not at all likely to prove an agreeable husband. This is decidedly no three-pipe problem. Mr Symons’s plot is of a modest near-transparency from the start – a fact cunningly ...”

“... that is to say that its metaphysical status is more or less acknowledged. In short, metaphysics may at the moment lay claim to the mind at its natural and favoured proving-ground: so to say, in lieu of The Universe as a whole: contracting into a microcosm. In its own small way, this signals a return to content in a subject which has over long been ...”

“... from close up. Much of its delight and terror is almost microscopic in source. Non-climbers may associate the sport with acrophobic spaces, alp on alp arising, but most of the climber’s experience is lived on a scale of millimetres rather than kilometres. Usually, after all, rock-climbers in particular must face inward, their eyes fixed intently on ...”

“... No one recovers from the sadomasochism of their childhood. We may not want to think of the relations between parents and children as power relations: indeed it may sound like a perversion of parenting to do so. And we don’t want to think of parents and children being in any way sexually gratified by their status in relation to each other ...”

“... you did. Your epidemiological duty is to minimise the expected number of life-years lost, which may mean accepting terrible suffering now to alleviate even worse suffering later. When you look at the numbers for Covid-19, the trolley problem becomes appalling, with hundreds of thousands of lives lost either way. ‘I wish I had a faith,’ she said – not ...”

“... such strange concepts as ‘dark energy’, ‘braneworlds’ and ‘wormholes’ – terms people may have heard of or perhaps read about, but still don’t really understand. Brian Greene, a leading expert in string theory, has now followed up his earlier, very successful book, The Elegant Universe, to give lucid and accessible explanations of a wider range ...”

“... getting things right in ways that are not of primary interest a century later. The modern writer may have to find ways of bringing off feats of comparable virtuosity, but they are unlikely to be discovered by close imitation. Attempts to do so may have an undesired outcome: the shadow of the older novel might darken or ...”

“... of the kind he usually visits on his readers. This time there is a ‘foreigner’s dream’ that may be a footnote, a preference or cold winds, a ‘countryman’ who may be a rustic or may be a compatriot of the foreigner who has the dream, and a ‘proper source’ that ...”