“... publicity material. Sheng shi hua zhang is a sonorous and vaguely archaic-sounding phrase which means something like ‘Splendours of an Age of Prosperity’, apt for the Qing era when the Chinese emperors ruled the largest and most populous empire on the globe. It is also a term with contemporary resonances, widely used to describe such phenomena as a new ...”

“... East Coast, where euphemisms are easily understood, and a phrase like ‘painting houses’ means contract killing, as it does in Scorsese’s The Irishman (2019). Though the obvious does occasionally have to be explained. As Michael Corleone says in The Godfather Part II, ‘if history has taught us anything, it is that you can kill anyone.’ It’s ...”

“... altered and three were quashed. It’s easy to see why so many of these cases go to appeal. But as David Ormerod, the law commissioner, said to the Justice Select Committee, the outcome of these appeals – like those of the original trials – ‘are often perceived as illogical or unfair’. In May 2010 two South London gangs, Shanks and Guns and the ...”

“... On 11 February​ , David Reitze, executive director of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (Ligo) in the US, announced that his team of almost a thousand scientists had detected evidence of gravitational waves emanating from a pair of black holes 1.3 billion light years from Earth. It was empirical confirmation of Einstein’s theory of general relativity ...”

“... name was Icek Judko Peretz; but in France he became known as André Perec. (Peretz in Hungarian means ‘pretzel’; in a typical cross-reference Gaspard Winckler, in the other half of W’s narrative, reveals that he never eats pretzels.) While his father’s family was originally quite prosperous, his mother grew up in the Warsaw ghetto; from there they ...”

“... And many liberal-minded people would shriek with them. What press freedom could survive? Koss means to overturn this prejudice. He leaves aside the question of what we mean by the freedom of the press anyway, but contends that the quality of newspapers has declined as their links with political parties have dissolved. An immense and irrevocable ...”

“... how carefully Lawrence refuses to recognise virtue in anyone but himself’), and his sponsor David Pryce-Jones now finds F.R. Leavis much the same, so it may be legitimate to cite the famous excoriation of Bloomsbury that was voiced by Lawrence and amplified by Leavis: ‘they talked endlessly, but endlessly – and never, never a good thing said. They ...”

“... dismissed Derek Lewis from his post as Director General of the Prison Service and appointed David Ramsbotham Chief Inspector of Prisons. Lewis then wrote a book about his experience – Hidden Agendas: Politics, Law and Disorder (1997) – which reflects very badly on Howard. Ramsbotham’s departure six years later was less publicly acrimonious ...”

“... flourishes, and its crowning glories are the five volumes of the Poems edited by Paul Hammond and David Hopkins and published by Longman between 1995 and 2005. But the pleasures of scholarship are not wholly coextensive with those of reading. Students are probably still encouraged to enjoy the measured venom of the satires. But where to go beyond that? Paul ...”

“... psychotherapy one is not trying to establish objective truth’ but rather to find ‘a means of containing experience, in the sense of giving it form and meaning’. This will usually involve going over and over the most difficult of life’s events rather than avoiding them, since ‘more often than not the truth is what works.’ ‘I can’t ...”

“... of the man!’ Walter Benjamin thought a philosophy that couldn’t account for fortune-telling by means of coffee grounds couldn’t be a real philosophy. Many have thought just the reverse, of course. One mention of coffee grounds and the like, and we are no longer talking about philosophy. But then these are just the people Benjamin was out to provoke, and ...”

“... 1938 congressional midterms was barely 35,000. This remarkably limited franchise was achieved by means of elaborate rules – including a poll tax – designed to make voting both difficult and expensive; it was backed up by threats of violence to anyone who challenged the status quo. The aim, of course, was to make sure the electorate remained exclusively ...”

“... always been a maker of projects rather than films: that is, of projects whose primary but by no means only expression is a film. Fitzcarraldo, the most demanding of them all, is a film about a project. Carlos Fermín Fitzcarrald López (1862-97), the opera-loving rubber baron, once got a boat across an isthmus by having it taken apart on one side and ...”

“... have noticed anything at all. The grasping mediocrity of this administration’s members is by no means its worst fault but it is the most beneficial to the nation if it is what eventually leads to its timely collapse. The resignations are the best-publicised outgrowth of governmental decay. The litany of names reads like the cast-list of some bizarre ...”

“... as to the value of revered works of literature need every so often to be dispelled, even if it means that some people swear off the canon altogether. For most others, the results aren’t likely to be so decisive or long-lasting. Like the warnings issued about cigarettes, the cautions about eggs, alcohol and chocolate, or the recent scare in the US about ...”