“... against the authoritarian powers of China and Russia and has found an influential reader in John McCain, an old-style promoter of American toughness. But it’s now quite hard to imagine Hu Jintao and Vladimir Putin, not to mention Osama bin Laden and other ‘enemies of the Free World’, quivering at the thought of a ‘concert of ...”

“... and a reproduced Camel cigarette packet: ‘from use’. The full works – chocolate-brown cloth, Brainard dustwrapper, author photo (flat cap, jeans, sandals, thumbs-hooked-in-belt) – yours for £1.50. Shamefully good value. You owed it to the poet to make a decent fist of reading the thing. Now, in an era of cut-throat discounts, peel-away ...”

“... using fMRI – notably, Semir Zeki – have pointed art studies in a significant new direction. John Onians and Barbara Maria Stafford, both art historians, certainly think so, though Neuroarthistory and Echo Objects argue the case in quite different ways. What might the far view be, from this new bend in the road? Suppose we could arrive at adequate ...”

“... of essays, mostly attacks on Orwell from the Left. The militants are Malcolm Evans, Alan Brown, Alaric Jacob, Bill Alexander, Robert Stradling, Beatrix Campbell, Deirdre Beddoe, Stephen Sedley, Lynette Hunter, Andy Croft, Stuart Hall, Antony Easthope and Christopher Norris. The attacks are now commonplace. Raymond Williams and other writers have been ...”

“... challenger, leave their mark. So do party differences, and not just in matters of policy. Allison Brown, a student of mine at Smith College, discovered that Republican and Democratic acceptance speeches of the Sixties and Seventies took different approaches to ‘sovereignty’. Republicans stressed the ultimate authority of God, which they implicitly ...”

“... me absolutely fucking crazy. All you ever talk about is junk.’ I looked over at her – brown hairs Van de Graaffing from her forehead; a pimple she’d been hoping nobody would notice caked in skin product; small, perfect teeth. I was wondering what her kiss would taste like, when she picked up a Clive Cussler novel that everyone in the pod had ...”

“... curly black hair, chocolate coloured skin’ in a casual but elegant outfit of beige boots and brown linen pants that make her look like ‘a poet, artist, publisher or writer’). However insufferable they may appear to the reader, they are admirable and likable to the therapist-on-the-page. Orbach imagined that each of her characters would embody one of ...”

“... else remains. Most of The Sixth Extinction is about dead or dying animals: the great auk, little brown bats, Neanderthals, sea snails, the Sumatran rhino. Such a book should be depressing, but Kolbert’s isn’t, largely because our attention is drawn not just to the work of destruction but also to the work of discovery. The asteroid impact that wiped out ...”

“... powers, but he opens this expanded version of his 2012 Gifford Lectures with a Father Brown story, ‘The Oracle of the Dog’: by howling at a certain time, the animal gives the priestly sleuth the clue to the murder weapon. Chesterton was consciously taking off from an earlier tale, Conan Doyle’s ‘Silver Blaze’, in which a guard dog fails ...”

“... powers, as well as for life after death. The first case he quotes is that of ‘a figure in a brown dress with broad lace collar and golden hair’ seen by three persons on separate occasions; he is most excited by cases of ‘collective hallucination’, which are methodically parsed for logical explanation: coincidence, telepathy or supernatural ...”

“... The supposed military success has revived the previously languishing campaign of the hawkish John McCain, who will now almost certainly be his party’s candidate for the presidency. Seldom has the official Iraqi and American perception of what is happening in Iraq felt so different from the reality. Barricaded behind the walls of the Green ...”

“... According to Henry James, reviewing John Cross’s life of George Eliot, the creations which brought her renown were of the incalculable kind, shaped themselves in mystery, in some intellectual back-shop or secret crucible, and were as little as possible implied in the aspect of her life. There is nothing more singular or striking in Mr Cross’s volumes than the absence of any indication, up to the time the Scenes of Clerical Life were published, that Miss Evans was a likely person to have written them; unless it be the absence of any indication, after they were published, that the deeply studious, concentrated, home-keeping Mrs Lewes was a likely person to have produced their successors ...”

“... Back-Bone of an Eel’. And then the rabbits began to appear.A local apothecary and obstetrician, John Howard, was the first person outside her immediate circle to examine Toft. He said he felt something ‘leaping’ in her womb. Under his supervision in Guildford, she went on to deliver a large number of dead rabbits, nine in a single day. Howard wrote ...”

“... that perhaps implied some unease over what exactly the painting was doing. For the poet and critic John Yau, the painting’s placement signalled its exclusion from the canon and by the same token Lam’s secondary status as a mere follower of Picasso or an imitator of Surrealism. MoMA’s current retrospective, When I Don’t Sleep, I Dream (until 12 ...”