“... 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 ...”

“... in the first five years of life which makes it impossible for the person to kill or steal.’ This may be a tall order to place on teachers, Whipple continued, but too bad: anyone who wanted to keep up with the latest scientific thinking must embrace ‘nurture’ and ‘kiss Nature goodbye’. For the next half-century, American psychologists ...”

“... right?’ Nora demurs: ‘Not one bit.’ The three adults have dinners together. Nora decides she may be in love with women and nearly confesses her love for Sirena before her lesbian friends talk her down. She dreams of the possibility of moving in with the Shahids and establishing a sort of gynocracy, perhaps in Vermont or Tuscany. Nora’s manic feeling ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... does the later Sicilian Expedition, a similarly remote and costly venture – that such campaigns may have been motivated by a more pressing and practical need. The history of Persian relations with Egypt and the West from Cyrus to Alexander reveals certain fundamental weaknesses in the Achaemenid military machine: slowness in mobilisation, inadequately ...”

“... or sold at the Alexandria market. Oddly, Thompson suggests that these forms of resistance ‘may have backfired’ by leading whites to consider black men and women ‘lazy and clumsy workers … a stereotype that continues to this day’. Washington certainly believed that blacks were indolent by nature. But this was an integral part of the ideological ...”

“... the reg­ion and, at times, its most brilliant military strategist. Iran’s clerical leadership may have dreamed of an Iranian sphere of in­fluence – a Shia crescent – but it was Soleimani who built it, patiently and ruthlessly, after becoming head of the Quds Force in 1998. He spent most of his time on the road, ensuring that Iran’s interests were ...”

“... line of communication’ (stärkster Verbindung) with the castle. The wrong destination may, after all, be the right one; and in another sense, too, since K. falls asleep and dreams that he is wrestling with a naked castle official who resembles a Greek god. It’s all to no avail. The next morning, Bürgel can’t wait to get rid of him, and he is ...”

“... his job description.There’s just enough religious education to convince young people that they may be damned, or worse than damned, plunged into ‘a darkness devoid of even the solace of the incandescent fires of hell’. The Church frowns on masturbation, but the code of Mexican machismo is more permissive, even allowing for deviations from ...”

“... much of a reader’s uncertainty about how to speak it. The ambiguity in the intonation of a text may create a mute polyphony through which we see rather than hear alternative ways of voicing the written words, and are led to reflect on the interplay of those possible voicings. Griffiths was hardly the first critic to admire poetry that ‘envisages and ...”

“... Pimentel says, ‘a blessed animal’. The earlier Greek geographer Strabo (c.63 BCE-c.24 CE), who may have seen a rhino in Egypt, offered a physical description: it had a single horn (‘rhinoceros’ from the Greek ῥῑνόκερως: nose + horn); it was smaller than an elephant; it bore some resemblance to a wild boar; and it had a welted hide very like ...”

“... a manifest violation of the Charter of the United Nations’. As of 17 July this year the ICC may begin to hear cases alleging that crime. Other methods were also employed in the hope of reducing armed conflict. Arbitration as an alternative to war was used increasingly over the 19th century as states concluded bilateral treaties obliging them to submit ...”

“... passages that occasionally interrupt the book, that Daniel will eventually realise he is gay, and may be transgender. ‘You have to appreciate that I never thought of myself as a man,’ he says midway through the novel. ‘I did not know then that it was girls not boys who grew their hair and their nails long.’ I suspect that Elmet would like to be ...”

“... step with English opinion; the substantive issues were matters of relative indifference. Theresa May’s political ally, Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionist Party, maintained a consistently negative policy towards European integration between the two referendums, though there were noticeable changes in tone and register. In 1975 the DUP’s co-founder ...”

“... The standard critique that contemporary society is swamped by spectacle, by images directed at us, may also have to be revised. If power today depends largely on data – on invisible information harvested, searched, surveilled and acted on by corporations, governments, insurance companies, credit agencies and police departments – how are we to track it, let ...”