“... Sylvie’s life continues to flow, and finally there is a veiled suggestion of movement that may or may not become an escape. ‘Something is pushing them/To the side of their own lives,’ Larkin observed of a group of young mothers gathered on a recreation ground. Motherhood and death, often juxtaposed, shape the ...”

“... of cases of Guillain-Barré syndrome were reported that seemed to be associated with the virus. In May 2015 the first confirmed indigenous cases of Zika virus infection were reported in north-east Brazil. Since then it has spread across the country, and so far has appeared in Mexico, Haiti, Puerto Rico, Barbados, Central America, Paraguay and other South ...”

“... sermons addressed to the passions? Johnson: They were nothing, Sir, be they addressed to what they may.‘Bang!’ Beerbohm writes, ‘and the rabbit that had popped from its burrow was no more.’ He continues: Why hadn’t Boswell told us there was a clergyman present? … I suppose the clergyman was left to take us unawares because just so did he take the ...”

“... spiss – oh! Yet, most spissantly ...Or:The squirming facts exceed the squamous mind,If one may say so ...Or:One’s tootings at the weddings of the soulOccur as they occur.An evening is said to ‘skreak and skritter’; ‘chu-chot-chu’ is the sound of the laughter of evil. ‘Such tink and tank and tunk-a-tunk-tunk’ is how Stevens in ‘A ...”

“... pronunciation or his mannerism would be cads, and they knew it.’Bottomley’s career ended in May 1922, with his prosecution for fraud. Key to his defeat was the defection of a group of admirers and associates, chief among them Reuben Bigland, a Birmingham printer. One difference between the two men was that Bottomley had escaped poverty by his late ...”

“... in James Kirkup’s autobiography, I, Of All People. ‘Ray Monk and others,’ he went on, ‘may be as intrigued as I was.’ The passage from Kirkup is as follows: ‘I was referred to specialists at the Ingham Infirmary in Westoe Road, and at the Newcastle Infirmary – where I had once spent a few days at the beginning of the war with ...”

“... had felt a mission to introduce the subject to English people in such simple form that ‘who runs may read.’ He introduced notions – for example, that of the transitional object – which were to put psychoanalytic understandings at the centre of later work on the epistemology of creativity. Transitional objects are those, like Linus’s baby blanket, the ...”

“... husband; many people thought that she had meant to seduce Bywaters into doing so. ‘Illicit love may lead to crime,’ the judge instructed the jury, adding unconvincingly: ‘You must not, of course, let your disgust carry you too far.’ In her novel about the case, A Pin to See the Peepshow, F. Tennyson Jesse suggested that the crime for which Edith ...”

“... a ‘module’ and knows what ‘long-chain monomers’ smell like. Prose-nerds, in other words, may feel neglected. Still, a lot of this stuff can be put down to observational exuberance, which gives the novel its distinctive, collage-like texture. Gibson knows that using an Internet chatroom feels ‘like sitting in a pitch-dark cellar conversing with ...”

“... and thinks that she should go to medical school. When she points out that she is a black woman and may not be admitted, he promises to ‘argue the case in court’. The exchange is vastly anachronistic. This is the language of present-day aspiration, replete with conventionally upper-middle-class professions and a faith in the power of anti-discrimination ...”

“... The inspector cautioned her. ‘There is nothing wrong in that,’ Lady Austin retorted. ‘You may think so, but it is what we call real love man for man. You call us Nancies and bum boys but . . . before long our cult will be allowed in this country.’ Lady Austin would have enjoyed Elton John’s ‘marriage’ to David Furnish last year – even the ...”

“... not left bereft, you know.’ And the conclusion is strangely upbeat: the future may be frightening for Fr Leahy, but only as it once was for those early Christian monks who rowed away into the unknown. All Trevor’s narrative gifts are evident in this story. The short paragraphs, cut and chiselled, are those of a puritan stylist. Vital ...”

“... Writing a love letter to the profession, rather than the subject matter, of literary study may well be the most daring and original aspect of the book. Many literature professors have declared their undying love for reading and teaching, but few have admitted to loving the academic game itself. More typically, they view joining the profession as the ...”

“... detect the ultraviolet spectrum, see something very different when they look at one another. Wires may be right to invoke the biblical notion of uncleanness, though not for the reason she gives. In Purity and Danger, Mary Douglas identifies ‘unclean’ creatures as those that inhabit multiple realms and live between categories. That’s the source of their ...”

“... to do.) Agamben’s subject is ‘bare life, that is, the life of homo sacer (sacred man), who may be killed and yet not sacrificed’. This man is sacred in the antithetical sense of the word now all but lost to us, that is to say, accursed, at the mercy of all. Indeed, in the Roman social order homo sacer was the lowest of the low, yet as such he was ...”