“... narrator, we experience once more, ‘in its original simplicity, the feeling of existence as it may quiver in the depths of an animal’. Except it does not always work as it ought, this sense that is not quite a sense. In certain cases, the feeling (or, worse, lack of feeling) of being embodied overwhelms us; the common sense fails and we succumb to one of ...”

“... not require that it persist beyond the lived present, which lasts for less than a second. That may be good enough for sea-snails, one might think, but what about us? Here Strawson offers his most startling observation: he himself does not have the sense of subjective persistence that, I assume, most people have. It does not seem to him that the self which ...”

“... midst of oil booms. Maass can’t be held responsible for all the wrongheaded thinking his book may encourage, but he might at least have considered the difference between correlation and causation. There are factual mistakes, too, in Maass’s account, specifically in his discussion of Saudi Arabia, the area I know best. Osama bin Laden’s ...”

“... speech in the story ‘Praises’ that is all the more pathetic for being sincerely meant: ‘May I for a moment be personal? For this place has been my life . . . And I have never wanted another. I remember the great days. It has been my privilege to serve – and to have for friends – the highest in the land’: that is, the women who come to her ...”

“... three teenagers searching for coal, and a taxi-driver who had been driving miners to work. It may also be that many don’t know, or have forgotten, how badly traditional mining communities suffered from the closing of the pits, and the move to neoliberalism. They have in effect become lost tribes, and one side-effect of this is the oddly ...”

“... a particular person? … It can seem that as far as what I really am is concerned, any relation I may have to TN or any other objectively specified person must be accidental and arbitrary. I may occupy TN or see the world through the eyes of TN, but I can’t be TN. I can’t be a mere person … The experiences and the ...”

“... a reasonable solution to the Scottish revolt, ‘then humbly they [the Scottish Parliament] may commit the governaunce thereof to the next heir of the crown’ – effectively Arran. Cecil’s acceptance of the power of parliament to depose a monarch resurfaced in the (English) Treason Act of 1571, which would have barred Mary from the succession if she ...”

“... with every pick-up truck he sold. (The voucher was for the semi-automatic version. US gun laws may be liberal, but they do have limits.) More to the point: the Kalashnikov has probably killed more people than any other hand-held weapon in history. That makes it one of the great industrial success stories of modern times. It was, of course, a Soviet ...”

“... In May 1977, Ian Paisley was in a television studio in Belfast when he bumped into Malachy McGurran, a leader of the Official IRA in Northern Ireland. At that time, Paisley was attempting to orchestrate a repeat of the loyalist workers’ strike that had defeated the Sunningdale power-sharing agreement three years earlier ...”

“... diligent array of evidence: contemporary contempt and hatred for the work of inquisitions. Some may regard it as poetic justice that the Dominican patron saint of inquisitors, Peter Martyr, ended his days hacked down with an axe by an angry Cathar in 1252. Among the necessary expenses for Paolo Costabili, the inquisitor of Ferrara in the 1560s, were extra ...”

“... answerable to the people is less vulnerable to the charge that it is anti-democratic. And it may also give rise to fewer objections precisely because it seems less ‘final’, more easily altered. A constitutional decision imposed by an unelected court, by contrast, dramatically raises the stakes. The Supreme Court in Furman did not help matters by ...”

“... Jonas, was himself rumoured to have been killed in the Libyan desert. So the man in the pub may not be a jihadi at all: he may, in fact, be a pimp, since after a bizarre exchange he refers Shakespeare to his prostitute, Winnie, a.k.a. Melissa. Shakespeare runs off with her, mainly in the hope of discovering whether ...”

“... and the people of Paris. Half of his 300 pages are devoted to the ‘semaine sanglante’ of 21-28 May during which the national army retook control of the capital after slaughtering as many as 25,000 civilians and combatants. He gives a vivid and grisly account of the street fighting, including the army’s use of machine guns to perform mass ...”

“... murders, and more battles. The openness was already there in the myth of fratricide: Romulus may have killed his brother, but he also welcomed all comers to his merry band of cut-throats on the Capitoline Hill. The Sabines became Romans, too, when the kidnapped women stepped between the raging armies and refused to allow their husbands and brothers to ...”

“... of a conversation or a relationship. When Thomsen talks to his dying, same-age aunt (with whom he may or may not have had a relationship), she sounds like his grandmother, because Amis insists on her calling him ‘Golito’ all the time. In English – in Amis – humour is privileged, always. But how to humour – and for ...”