“... are enclosed apartment complexes. Small ones consist of a couple of buildings, big ones may be the size of a small town. The community I live in was built in the 1980s by several government departments, which allocated the apartments to their staff. Some resourceful departments still act as real estate developers, building communities and selling ...”

“... the imminent arrival of the ambulance, I am seized by the thought that I should shower, since it may be a while before I get to wash again. Afterwards, I sit in a chair and wait.Around midnight, L. opens the door to two tall young paramedics, dressed in green and with face masks and goggles. They surge up the stairs into the little back room, seeming to fill ...”

“... a sense in which Hourani withdrew from that century. Apart from political disappointment, boredom may well have been a factor in his renunciation of active politics. ‘My boredom threshold is low,’ he was fond of remarking. So he moved from politics to political history and, later, from political to social history. He preferred to write about the 18th and ...”

“... resolution of the paradox the harem presents in relation to sexual appetite: although the seraglio may contain many women, coupling is, by definition, done in pairs and stamina sets a limit on serial or collective performance. She sees in the blissful, figure-cushioned interior he has assembled (much of it from other paintings, not all of them his own) a ...”

“... the temple courtyard. Though he comes from a line of priests, Willie’s father is not, as Maugham may have supposed, a man of spiritual depth, being more interested in the fame of the visitor after whom he named his son than in his religious investigations. Maugham’s title alludes to a metaphor from the Upanishads, comparing the way of enlightenment to the ...”

“... every second is underwritten/by an invisible host of dubious connections.’ Ford’s ‘we’ may in this instance reflect Postmodern paranoia; but it also repeats the conventional psychoanalytic doctrine of unconscious motivation; and if the poet succeeds in naming for himself some of his previously unremarked dubious connections, the rest of us can ...”

“... the excess carbon in the atmosphere – though the benefits for the mitigation of global warming may be limited and temporary. This strategy might help to buy, at best and other things being equal, a few decades to institute viable alternatives to fossil fuels, before the carbon re-enters the atmosphere through the natural death and decay of the trees in ...”

“... world. It is also true that I am not competent to restore it. Neither is there candour, and here I may be of some use. (‘October’) The last phrase is acutely self-aware, but this cannot justify its false modesty. If used automatically, irony can become archness: Come to me, said the world. This is not to say it spoke in exact sentences but that I ...”

“... my sex yet I was simpler then. And so I can’t leave off going in after myself tho’ some day I may. I didn’t know after I left you at Newent I was going to begin to write poetry. This is not really fair to Frost: ‘The Road Not Taken’ doesn’t treat choice as straightforwardly as Thomas claims, and it’s certainly not the hymn to self-reliance that ...”

“... John McGahern is an extraordinary writer of charm and violence. His most recent novel, That They May Face the Rising Sun (2002), has a looseness and a gaiety which it took him nearly seventy years to allow himself. His earlier work marked him as one of the great writers of claustrophobia. His novels tend to evoke small places – single houses or tiny communities – and to crush into those places a set of family and moral ties that make them feel even smaller and tighter ...”

“... employed by scientific journals. The case for restricting an industrial pollutant, for example, may be substantial, and urgent for public health, and at the same time incomplete. The Data Quality Act and its peer-review provisions, Mooney points out, ‘simply give industry groups, which already have a right to challenge final regulations in court, multiple ...”

“... of fashionable sensibility perhaps; of some of the less palatable elements in her background she may have been unaware. She may never have known that her 16-year-old ‘cousin’ Joseph, who appeared in the Kauffman family in 1750, travelled with them for some time and then drifted away again to pursue a much less ...”

“... afternoon into the heat of the tropics. They leave a smell of the impossible. Individually they may not be profound; they may not, like travel, be broadening. But the pleasure and the power are enormous. This taste of the unfamiliar has of course to come from the travellers themselves, from their expectations and their ...”

“... But there are other elements in it which, given the author and given the text he is explicating, may come as more of a surprise. Much of the book is witty and ironic and insouciant in tone; almost all of it shows a fertile, restless intelligence hard at work; in some respects, it is a model of how to make a little learning go a long way. The resourcefulness ...”

“... job.’ ‘Anyway, I’ve been thinking about it – the security bit. The pictures and things may be safe enough – even the dinosaurs – but I can’t say I feel it myself.’ ‘Oh, so you think I’m no good at it,’ said the young man quickly. ‘There were dozens in for the job – dozens, I don’t mind telling you. But they just happened to ...”