“... language of the heart’ and so on. Bushrui and Jenkins stress Sufi influence on Gibran and there may have been some. Nevertheless, every element in his thought can alternatively be traced to Western sources, including Blake, Nietzsche, Emerson, Maeterlinck, Whitman and Ouspensky.Ouspensky was perhaps the most interesting of these influences. He was born in ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of fact. I am in a position to know. However right Paul Rogers, Lee Chadwick, Arthur Gavshon and I may have been, the fact is that without the sustained interest of Guardian readers, and, in my case, the Labour Party up and down the country, there was no way which the professors of Belgrano Studies, as David Frost has christened us, could have carried on. Many ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... comes from somewhere that might be nowhere. Daney’s summary of the speech is: ‘Whatever I may say to you, I speak from a place I’ll never be again, a place you haven’t yet reached.’ Daney left Cahiers in 1981 to write columns for Libération; he died of Aids ten years later at the age of 48. He was remembered earlier this year in New York at ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... At least religion involves billions of people, however doubtful its socially transformative powers may be. The redemptive role of art is the opium of the intelligentsia, a mirage that refuses to be put to rest: Simon Schama told us recently on television that art is where a divided society can find some common ground. What can be true of art, however, can ...”

“... of agnosticism. Maimonides seems to be saying that if you would like to believe something you may do so, so long as you first verify that there is no compelling, rational argument to the contrary. And creationism was something Maimonides wished to believe. He calls it the ‘indispensable basis of the whole religious Law’, presumably because a God who ...”

“... don’t inherit it. Such effects can be counterintuitive; a genetic variant in your parents’ DNA may make you more intelligent when you don’t inherit it, but have the opposite effect when you do.As researchers have come to better understand these issues, they have developed experimental designs to estimate the contribution of the various factors in ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... is apparently best-qualified to hold it. The BBC has even been heard to argue that, although women may not participate in programmes in numbers reflecting their share of the population (in which, of course, they constitute the majority), they do sufficiently represent the small proportion of their sex in public life. Meanwhile, bravely pioneering women have ...”

“... Perhaps he delighted too much in discriminating. The sheer, restless pleasure in knowing more may have been too absorbing. Perhaps Bloomsbury’s cult of conversation and friends was too absorbing. I suspect him, too, of perfectionism: he was overcome by his admiration for the talents of others and, having means, he felt a guilt in earning money. Perhaps ...”