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“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... defined, grammar is a body of statements of fact – a “science”; but a large portion of it may be viewed as consisting of rules for practice, and so forming an “art”.’ Rules, rules. And Latin. As Latin slowly passed out of all but liturgical and classroom existence, it became the model of the rule-bound language. Each noun followed one of five ...”

“... very specific and bizarre form of interaction. Any temporary discomfort that an interview subject may occasion by being ill-mannered, belligerent – or, as in this case, authentically tonto – tends to be cancelled out for the interviewer by the felicitous prospect of ‘good copy’. In fact, behaviour that would be embarrassing or disastrous in any other ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... sheer amount, the endlessness of cod. The vast cod-grazing grounds off the American Atlantic coast may well have drawn the very first Europeans to the continent: Mark Kurlansky provides evidence that not only Viking explorers but Basque fishermen were there long before Columbus – they kept secret the source of their mysterious supplies of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... and persons, but seeing as good whatever beliefs, actions and persons enter your field of view. It may arise in order to encourage diversity, but it also provides the comforts of conformism by dictating that all should judge alike. It is forbidden to give offence, where offence is understood subjectively, as a violation not of general standards but of personal ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”