“... study by the sociologists Ken-Hou Lin and Donald Tomaskovic-Devey, financialisation in the US may have been responsible for more than half the fall in labour’s share of national income between 1970 and 2008. Exorbitant pay levels at the top further widen the gaps: today, nearly 14 per cent of the top 1 per cent in the US work in finance, and take home ...”

“... on the Olivetti. In retrospect, although the decision to revert to a redundant writing technology may have been prompted by the valetudinarian tower block, there was an underlying and more significant cause: wireless broadband had been installed in our house, and now whenever I was writing I was only a few finger-flicks away from all the pullulating ...”

“... Ussher was simply deploying the best scholarly practice of his time. Today’s earth scientists may use radiometric dating, but they are driven by the same motive as Ussher: the quest for an accurate and detailed chronology. Rudwick emphasises the positive, or at least unobstructive, role of religion since Ussher, correcting the received idea that the 19th ...”

“... perambulations around the changing city. He worked on the buses: ‘Over there, madam, you may espy a Thornycroft ’bus,’ he says. ‘Yonder, by the portico of the Apollo, that there is the Fischer ’bus.’ Audrey works in an umbrella factory and falls in love with an ineffectual radical called Gilbert, under whose influence she becomes a ...”

“... Boy. The armed forces, for their part, have consistently refused to estimate how many people they may have unjustly killed, injured or mistreated during their six-year occupation of Iraq. An unproved war crime is just an allegation to the people it doesn’t touch, and the conventional way of testing serious allegations is to hold a trial. A.T. Williams’s A ...”

“... this is a further chapter in Warner’s unfolding of the power – the magical power as it may be – of the magical imagination. Occasionally, her efforts to extol the ‘torrential energies of the irrational’ seem about to lead her into a reflex anti-rationalism, as when she describes the way in which The Arabian Nights taught Goethe ‘how to give ...”

“... beautiful over time. It was a personal take, but there wasn’t much to argue with. Schwarzenegger may not be your cup of tea, but you see what Eco means – and I suppose Arnie’s better than Steven Seagal if a hunk is a must. It’s true, and Eco acknowledges it, that there can only be intelligent guesses about the artefacts that have survived from before ...”

“... his point of view the occasion was disastrous, but from other points of view, as he implies, it may have been something else. The event was memorable, but what exactly was memorable about it? Hartman leaves that question open. Was the room ‘overfull’ because it was too small, or because Lacan had tricked too many people into admiring him? On the other ...”

“... Roth, no prude, criticised the novel as a ‘relentless work of violent pornography’; Malamud may have started with Kafka in mind, but he settled for the Story of O. They threatened to pump blood out of his penis with a machine they had for that purpose. The machine was a pump made of iron with a red indicator to show how much blood was being drained ...”

“... speaker’s click brings up the next slide. On the page we are out of his or her control, and we may get stuck or distracted. The idea that it is possible, desirable even, to arrive at a single winning set of cards, even at an agreed set of artists, has gone. Success lies in finding sequences that carry a narrative, although the notion that there is only one ...”

“... Iraq has determined the political landscape of Iraq for the foreseeable future. The shooting may have died down for the moment, but the killings of 2006 and early 2007 have left a legacy of hatred and fear. Even the most liberal-minded Sunni and Shia no longer feel at ease in each other’s company. The story of one family from al-Khudat, a middle-class ...”

“... sometimes asked by the established white congregation to worship elsewhere. The Church of England may well have thereby denied itself the new energy it needed to reverse its decline; rejected Irish Catholics simply set about building churches of their own. Delaney notes the ‘piquancy’ of the moment in 1960 when the Catholic community of Tollington Park in ...”

“... interest in the ‘adventure spirit of the young’. Discussing the ways that farming and herding may have spread across Mesolithic Europe, he suggests that this spread was ‘embedded in a system of social values, enshrining the belief that young men could only gain social status by leading colonising expeditions’. The distance they could cover from home ...”

“... which ended long ago, but whose effects continue to be felt today. The term ‘postvernacular’ may in any case be premature. Shoppers constructing ethnic identity through ‘purchase’ can take for granted that Yiddish is no longer a language in which they might express themselves. But others speak and write it every day. How many? The question has yet to ...”

“... their shared interests in sex, marriage and private life. It seems important to some that her work may have been performed with a chorus, rather than by a single singing voice (although then again, it may not have been; we don’t really know). Feminist scholars try to find in Sappho a vision of language and desire based not ...”