“... turned against what had become its greatest embarrassment. (Forget about the blood pressure.) In May 1382 the new archbishop of Canterbury, William Courtenay, an old adversary, convened a council at Blackfriars, famous for concluding its deliberations in the middle of a small earthquake, which condemned Wyclif’s more obvious heresies, a weapon aimed more ...”

“... In May 2000 the Clay Mathematics Institute announced that it was offering seven prizes, worth $1 million each, for the solutions to seven mathematical problems, which had been identified by a group of internationally acclaimed mathematicians as the seven most difficult and most important unsolved mathematical problems of the day ...”

“... girls has called one of the black girls ‘N-I-G-G-E-R’. It is clear from the start that she may not be telling the truth; she is a cow-girl, someone who enjoys an adventure and a fight, and isn’t interested in whether the facts justify aggression. When the narrator asks Arnetta what will happen if the white girls deny the charge, she says: ‘Don’t ...”

“... colours, stitched from different fabric. At the same time, Taylor advises, contemporary feminists may find it rather more difficult to appreciate the religious roots of Wollstonecraft’s thoroughgoing egalitarianism. For even though much feminist thought over the centuries has been ‘deeply embedded in religious belief’, recent work on Wollstonecraft on ...”

“... other texts to interpret it. But the effort of interpretation creates a weight of expectation that may prove intolerable, and stuffing such big claims as ‘Ulyssean’ into such a thin book – as the dust jacket does – might make it burst. In the Babel Dark sections, Winterson allows herself to tell, in part, an old-fashioned love story (while Silver’s ...”

“... it’s when she took on the Modernist canon that her work most often ran awry. Pissing on Dickens may be one thing, but a writer like Pierre Guyotat is hardly in need of ‘appropriation’ by a white Jewish writer from New York. Too often, her novels were a barrage of attacks on writerly skills she lacked. Her extravagant self-presentation often worked ...”

“... too, and a little bit sad. Misha is many things, but he is never an occasion for pathos. This may be a consequence of Shteyngart’s indiscriminate joke-making. Almost nothing escapes Shteyngart’s satirical guns. He takes aim at American military contractors and their effect on the countries in which they operate: ‘Golly Burton, Golly Burton!’ the ...”

“... a pale cloud . . . splitting in the April sky’: a dream of elsewhere. (The red of the wedding may also have a resonance with the ‘Chinaman’ who is mentioned at the wedding feast, and becomes part of the story’s essential subject later.) ‘Each one a deeper shade of red’ doesn’t describe the real order in which the differently red flowers ...”

“... and the self-interested actions for which the members of this Long Parliament became famous. It may also account for the paucity of sources from which historians can derive the Long Parliament’s history. The first half of Patterson’s study is an examination of those sources, from the publicly printed royal speeches that frequently opened sessions and ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... At​ 9 a.m. on 7 May 1915, the commander of U-Boat-20, Lieutenant Walther Schwieger, troubled by low fuel and heavy fog, decided to end his marauding in the Irish Sea and return to Wilhelmshaven. Shortly after one o’clock, he took a last look around through his periscope. The fog had lifted and in his sights was ‘a big passenger steamer ...”

“... in the 20th century’, and what strength in such a case might involve, has its interest, but may in the end not be the main thing. In a century of migrations and dépaysements, mapping motif onto birthplace is most often deceptive. Arthur Lismer and Fred Varley were born in Sheffield, and certainly ended up infinitely better landscape painters than ...”

“... is full of nets and snares and weaving. Even clear and visible symbols like the opening beacon may not mean what they appear to mean, and may convey different things to different people. Aeschylus made lots of different things go on in a single scene or speech or image, and in so doing established a way of representing ...”

“... Whenever there is a breakthrough in genetic engineering, there are inevitably fears that it may be used irresponsibly in human reproduction. The nature of the arguments hasn’t been changed by CRISPR, but it’s more urgent that we address them. Doudna has thought about the issues, but it isn’t clear that she goes beyond paying lip service to some of ...”