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“... domestic: they are full of husbands and wives, rather than lovers and girlfriends, of in-laws, aunties, the rubble of toys on the living-room floor, jobs (and failing to get jobs), holidays (family packages to the South of France and Morocco figure prominently as the outer limits of the exotic). Since Larkin and Douglas Dunn’s Terry Street, the ...”

“... of popular music, spinning the Beatles in a new direction. Meeting Shankar changed things for John Coltrane, too, helping him shake his dependence on drugs, while opening his ears to Eastern scales. Before Philip Glass worked with Shankar on a film score in 1965, he had been churning out unremarkable pastiches of French neoclassicism fused with folksy ...”

“... and unfortunate.Or this from Roger Penrose in The Road to Reality: A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe (2005):Although mathematical truths of various kinds had been surmised since ancient Egyptian and Babylonian times, it was not until the great Greek philosophers Thales of Miletus (c.625-547 BC) and Pythagoras of Samos (c.572-497 BC) began to ...”

“... obligation and behaviour for more than two millennia. In Gilead, Robinson’s dying preacher, John Ames, ruminates that we are ‘a little civilisation built on the ruins of any number of preceding civilisations’, and the explicit argument of Reading Genesis is that we fail adequately to understand this patrimony. We are diminished by this, and so is ...”

“... but useful in providing provisional relief: some of these things are finely dealt with in John Wiltshire’s Samuel Johnson in the Medical World, recently reviewed in this paper. This is yet another way of being literal-minded, characteristically Johnsonian and quite remote from anything specifically ‘oriental’. Johnson’s Orient is, perhaps ...”

“... years of Africa as I had months – almost After Casement’s arrest in 1916, Conrad wrote to John Quinn in New York: We never talked politics ... He was a good companion: but already in Africa I judged that he was a man, properly speaking, of no mind at all. I don’t mean stupid. I mean that he was all emotion. By emotional force (Congo ...”

“... the natives are cruel and irrational, in need of guidance and tips and the wisdom of Western laws and the bright, clear line of Western narrative. Bowles’s trick as a narrator is to make each side as unreliable as the other. While one side merely look like animals, the others, travelling with money and attitude, act like animals whenever they can, or ...”

“... to move men, money and votes upwards to the centre, and to organise the administration of national laws that came back down. They were to be, Sieyès wrote later, ‘more than confederated states; they are true, integral and essential parts of one and the same whole. This observation is important so that one never compares us with the United States of ...”

“... together and once cut up a snake into very small pieces to see if contrary to the known laws of nature we couldn’t make it stop wriggling before sundown. Like many of the letters, this has the makings of a Frost poem: an intimacy conjured up out of thin air, coupled with an unpredictable sense of where that intimacy might lead; talk of triumph ...”

“... Wilkin, who printed almost all of her works; and the one-time Oxford philosopher and theologian John Norris, who encouraged her thinking and who in 1695 published their Letters Concerning the Love of God, thus saving Astell’s letters to him from the abyss into which much of her correspondence fell. Her opening letter, written on 21 September 1693 when she ...”

“... the agency would be far better off killing, rather than jailing, terror suspects.’ According to John Rizzo, a career CIA lawyer, Obama officials ‘never came out and said they would start killing people because they couldn’t interrogate them, but the implication was unmistakable … Once the interrogation was gone, all that was left was the ...”

“... I looked fat, dull and unmanly. The achievements of others, particularly those of my older brother John, stood in for anything that I might achieve myself, and afterwards a series of distinguished men were to step into John’s shoes. I acquired a spectacular ability to not see, identify or shrewdly evaluate people or ...”

“... Mastership of Trinity, practised critical scholarship in his commentary on Marcus Aurelius, and John Pearson, an eminent theologian, who was successively Master of Jesus, Master of Trinity and Bishop of Chester, displayed it in brilliant emendations of the text of Aeschylus. In 1662 Richard Bentley, one of the greatest critical scholars, was born near ...”

“... electricity is cut, taxes remain uncollected, emergency calls go unheeded. Because apartheid laws and regulations were primarily designed to suppress and control, they have lost all legitimacy even where they potentially benefit the people. In a state of anomie, paralysed by the daily struggle to survive, the majority of the population waits to be ...”

“... head on, and, quoting George Herbert’s poem ‘The Elixir’ (‘Who sweeps a room, as for thy laws/Makes that and th’action fine’) seems to resolve it by saying that all human occupations undertaken in the right spirit may and should become exercises in the discipline of virtuous attention. In The Green Knight, a similar accommodation is reached ...”