“... preposterously, to compete with the theme. ‘In attempting to control death, the toreros and I may have a little in common. We have attempted the impossible, something which stands in the face of nature.’ In Lorca’s mummified Granada home, she touches the light-switch he may have touched on the way to his death, and ...”

“... that closely. The World Trade Center wasn’t just a landmark, lofty and awe-inspiring though it may have been, it marked the edge of south Manhattan. It defined the boundaries of our city selves. Some compared it unfavourably to the Empire State Building or the Chrysler Building. Others detested it as a symbol of unfettered free trade and private ...”

“... I know where Gopal Ghosh lives – we could go there.’ Of course, owning a Gopal Ghosh may not be owning a Picasso; but his paintings were held in high regard. Just as Pramathesh’s career as a chartered accountant and an employee was at the fledgling stage, so was the Indian art world, with its ambivalences and lack of ...”

“... would ever have had any colour at all. This seems inconsistent with the meaning of the word: there may be an independent metaphysical argument to show that gold is not yellow, but if it’s yellow now, it was yellow before there were any human beings and would have been yellow even if creatures with vision or living organisms were not among the possibilities ...”

“... the population of Birmingham rose from 15,000 to 70,000. The ironworks in which he had an interest may have failed but with his involvement Bage had taken a stake in the future. Older attitudes lingered, however. A reviewer of Joseph Priestley’s Memoirs claimed in 1806 that ‘there is something universally presumptuous in provincial genius.’ It wasn’t ...”

“... for parasites. Some citizens were perceived as suffering lesser privations than others; it may be that Ivor Novello’s real crime was not fiddling petrol but running a Rolls in wartime. All along, the temptations of those six long years had been huge and the excuses for misdemeanour plentiful and persuasive. ‘Perhaps,’ Thomas writes, ‘there had ...”

“... briefly as matches. The weariness of the book is appropriate to a novel about middle age, and it may be part of Baker’s photorealism to respect the inarticulacy of the mind. But consciousness is here treated as an errant and frightening creature to be kept on a very short rein, and it is tempting to see in this the still chastening effect of The ...”

“... I starved on dreams, and found them good. Some of the unsatisfied craving and self-laceration may derive from literary convention: although the same poem announces that ‘My love was false, and then she died,’ nothing in the present biography encourages us to take this literally. Levy herself acknowledged her debts to ...”

“... known, though how much resemblance it bore to the Village Powell had lived in was hard to say. It may once have felt more alive with ambition and curiosity and youth, but it struck me that this air of sadness, an inducement to writing in itself, would always have been there. Perhaps, with its being a kind of village, a certain small-town claustrophobia ...”

“... zombie to start with, on the grounds that the presence of appropriate representational properties may itself guarantee the presence of phenomenal subjectivity. This will follow if we adopt a ‘representational theory of consciousness’, according to which conscious properties are constituted by representational properties. On any such theory, a ...”

“... internally. Dante’s work of linguistic theory, De vulgari eloquentia, suggests that there may be more than a thousand ‘kinds of speech’ in Italy, and in his great poem several of these are recorded: as Carson notes in the introduction to his translation, the language ‘moves from place to place’. Virgil, representative of cosmopolitan ...”

“... turned down both this overture and the next, while remaining an admiring and respectful friend. It may, nevertheless, have been her memory of Paget’s demanding nature which caused her, in 1915, to attempt the rescue of the latest female recruit, Irene Cooper Willis, by introducing her to Bertrand Russell. Ottoline decided Irene could be more usefully ...”

“... A conflict which has left between sixty and a hundred thousand people dead is not untraumatic. It may be – as Calderón’s government insisted – that a high percentage of the dead had knowingly opted for the wild pleasures of the criminal life, but thousands and thousands of others were collateral damage. Besides, even the worst criminals have the right ...”

“... Anne Boleyn) and rush towards the wide-open spaces of the estate. The bad writing of this section may be a piece of cleverness I don’t quite get. Here are the girls on the look-out for a good picnic spot: they began to excitedly descend the slight brae towards the castle but then veered over to their right. As their vantage widened across the slope, they ...”

“... the logic might work the other way round: that’s to say, the experiences of everyday life may influence our brain structures or activities. It has been found that the posterior part of the hippocampus of black-cab drivers is enlarged by comparison with a control group (though one London cabbie told us he didn’t believe a word of it as he’d been a ...”