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“... for decades. ‘BLUE MURDER’ was the Sun’s headline on 19 April, the morning after Theresa May dropped her ‘election bombshell’: ‘PM’s snap poll will kill off Labour.’ The Daily Mail cheered May’s ‘stunning move’ as finally providing an opportunity to ‘CRUSH THE SABOTEURS’. The Express summed up ...”

“... now remembers or is much concerned about Lassa fever or legionnaire’s disease? The herpes hype may, however, be rather more important than some of its predecessors, since the fears, anxieties and guilts it generates have quite devastating effects in individual cases. Quite how a disease becomes a talking-point is not known: interest in pop stars, new ...”

“... of global secular society, and serves instead as the facilitator of a barely concealed ‘You may!’ It is today’s apparently hedonistic and permissive society that is, paradoxically, more and more saturated by rules and regulations (restrictions on smoking and drinking, rules against sexual harassment etc), so that the notion of a passionate ethnic ...”

“... target for mockery, but loud doggerel and insistent overacting are no substitute for wit. The play may well enjoy a steady run simply because its subject is topical and its script full of four-letter words. But if you want to indulge your hatred, envy or disdain, as the case may be, for the wonderful world of financial ...”

“... the wreckage of political reputations. A more forgiving, or less demanding, British Parliament may now permit Irish Secretaries to enhance their reputations in coping with a tiresome, incomprehensible problem of little apparent relevance to the British polity. But the unforgiving realities of Ireland have continued to crush each effort at solution. The ...”

“... But anyone who expects a full and informed debate and a vote that reflects public opinion may be disappointed. There are several reasons. David Cameron, who is known to be opposed to the measure, has declined to make parliamentary time – i.e. time allocated by the government whips – available for it. This means that Marris will have to run the ...”

“... that these emotions are central is not to say that they are the most often felt; their centrality may lie in the strength of our desire to avoid them. William Miller’s suggestion has a creeping plausibility – in the playground, among teenagers, among mid-life colleagues, in the retirement home. It has a serious claim to express a human universal, valid ...”

“... The model of practical philosophy must take the place of a theoria whose ontological legitimation may be found only in an intellectus infinitus that is unknown to an existential experience unsupported by revelation. This model must also be held out as a contrast to all those who bend human reasonableness to the methodical thinking of ...”

“... of the People’s Republic, taken in July 1982, recorded 1,031,882, 511 Chinese, including, we may notice, the 18 million in ‘Taiwan Province’ and five and a half million in the ‘Hongkong and Macao Region’. These were not unexpected totals. Western demographers do not seem likely to quarrel with them, or to doubt that China is the first political ...”

“... to the centre. The choice on offer at this election was real and the voters embraced it. It may be one of the better arguments, but that still doesn’t make it convincing. No election that results in the prospect of a minority government formed between the Tories and the DUP can be a great advertisement for two-party politics. There are many words that ...”

“... trouble us in practice. In his famous example, an object moving against a contrasting background may be referred to by one man as a rabbit, by another as a gavagai, and although we can never in principle know that the one is referring to what the other is, and thus never know that ‘gavagai’ exactly translates as ‘rabbit’, we ...”

“... but a history of nothing – well, that is science. The same can be said, multipliedly, of Derwent May’s book, which is essentially a history of the book review, a genre of such tiny dignity that its life might better be left unexamined. Over large portions, this book is about nothing – or, nothing more than the weekly phut-phut of the English literary ...”

“... Proportions varied from region to region. In London by the end of the 17th century illiteracy may have been down to two-thirds or a quarter; for women about a half. There were fluctuations over time: a rapid growth in literacy immediately after the Henrician Reformation and again in the early years of Elizabeth’s reign; a recession from 1580 to ...”

“... whose pasts, and the processes leading to their presents, history is supposed to consist. All that may be changing, with the advent of the global village, in which no one’s home is one’s own; with the advent, too, of a universally-imposed alienation, in which one’s identity is presupposed either as some other’s aggression against one, or as one’s own ...”

“... winner who cannot in fact swim, and by us, the readers.The joke, if it is a joke, is that heroism may be a function of incompetence. Or that we only have winners because we are losers. Or that being the best at something is being unable to do it. Or, indeed, that we have the wrong idea about what it is to swim, or to win a race, or even about what a race ...”