“... they were more likely than plays and operas to be by, as well as partly about, women. Ms Peters may be right in surmising that the £200-a-week Irving paid Ellen Terry in the Nineties ‘probably made her, with the exception of the Queen, England’s highest-paid woman’, but my guess is that, if there is a contestant, she was a novelist. Marie ...”

“... of it, but I’m intimidated by the guidance to use 800 kg of material to get it started (‘this may seem like a lot,’ one manual says, ‘but you’ll find that you can never have enough of the resulting compost’). Dowding devotes most of his attention to the method that, after 25 years of experimenting, I, too, have found to be the simplest and the ...”

“... data and better hardware. OpenAI released GPT-2 in 2019 and the larger and more powerful GPT-3 in May 2020. In November 2022 it launched ChatGPT, alongside an updated model, GPT-3.5. A significantly larger model, GPT-4, came out in March 2023. Scaling up again from GPT-4 has proved a significant challenge, however, and since 2023 improvements have come from ...”

“... seams with zealous revolutionaries who need to be refuted by a backward glance at Hegel. And Hegel may not be as easy to put to this use as one might think. Bourke recognises that, despite prizing the modern constitutional state above all others, Hegel was keenly aware of the defects of the society over which that state stood guard. There was the struggle ...”

“... the thoughtful exploration of his life and work currently on display at Pallant House (until 10 May). Today Nicholson is more known about than known. Some works – his child unfriendly Alphabet (B is for Beggar, U is for Urchin), the illustrations for The Velveteen Rabbit and the portrait of him in his favourite spotted dressing gown by William Orpen ...”

“... Æthelred’s premature death in 871, Alfred, his brother and heir, bribed the Danes to leave. It may have been the resulting pressure on the Mercians, as much as the temporary ending of West Saxon assistance, that led Burhred to flee to Rome in 874. Coins depicting his successor, Ceolwulf, and Alfred side by side (the so-called ‘Two ...”

“... supporting the group by supporting activities that Hamas would also be expected to support.In May 2024 activists in London unfurled a banner showing a giant dove carrying a key and flying through a breach in Israel’s apartheid wall. A police officer noticed that the dove was flying in what he described as ‘a clear blue sky with no clouds’. In the ...”

“... blind people, for example, experience heightened hearing or smell.) Siken’s new style may be a form of disability gain. If, as he proposes, ‘style is how you compensate for what you can’t do,’ then new compensation implies a new style. A poet who once used language to rip the world apart now sees the way simple words can put it together.The ...”

“... been so sumptuously entertained by such a distinguished collection of bankrupts’. The bankers may have laughed, but Sampson thinks Lever meant it. If this is the case – and it may well be – it is a very serious state of affairs. Sampson, of course, wrote his book principally to do what he is so good at: putting ...”

“... have brought things now to a pretty pass. One just has to read what Vaizey says. The working class may once have been warm and wonderful, but council estates are now full of ‘yobbos’. New hospitals are ‘white elephants’. Public education ‘institutionalises ignorance’. Trade unionists are ‘bibulous’. There has of course been the Falklands. ‘At ...”

“... according to a fixed ‘curve’, which dictates that less than a quarter of the population may achieve useful amounts of O-level passes and less than a tenth do well enough to proceed to higher education. It seemed essential, therefore, that neither the curriculum nor assessment should be allowed to trap the majority, or their schools and ...”

“... surrealist-erotic episodes; Durrell the farcical pornographer in the Henry Miller manner. Opinions may vary, but for myself a little of this goes a long way. There are reflective and speculative interludes, on the nature of art and the conduct of life. Recurrently through the series the doctrines of a certain Gnostic sect are discussed and partly expounded ...”

“... an overweening desire to impress, which is always disastrous, or simply as flat and bathetic. Some may have been damaged by removal from the contexts that gave them their only true point, but others, it seems to me, cannot even have this said for them. A paradoxical result of Stephen Brook’s having arranged fictional and real-life accounts of dreams in ...”

“... But a writer of even the most austere narrative cannot escape Droysen’s doctrine, much as many may pretend otherwise. Thus no one will be able to write an acceptable history of the Roman Republic without incorporating into the narrative Hopkins’s findings about the nature and limits of aristocratic continuity, and therefore shifting Cicero’s boast of ...”

“... the riddle. Without it, you would presumably be unaware of its existence in others; with it, you may wonder about the purpose it serves, and how it could have evolved, and about the mechanisms of the brain that give rise to it. You may even wonder about how it is logically possible for you to be aware that you are aware ...”