“... of Lévi-Strauss himself, who has said he was relieved when the fashion came to an abrupt end in May 1968. (A student slogan of the day proclaimed: ‘Structuralism does not go out into the streets.’) Yet with the gradual translation of his work into English, Lévi-Strauss’s reputation continued to grow in France and abroad, and as late as 1981, when the ...”

“... city where ashes were beginning to cool, and in a country that would never be the same again. We may think of the man in Love in the Time of Cholera who lies beautifully and romantically to the woman he loves, not because he wants to deceive her but because he doesn’t want to disappoint her stylistic expectations. She doesn’t believe him for a ...”

“... frights’ in the supermaxes, not only led the Iraq team appointed by the State Department in May and June 2003, but made a brief visit to Haiti after the overthrow of Aristide to oversee prison reform there. As Stewart (who at the time was running a security consulting firm in Phoenix called Advanced Correctional Management) put it: ‘We need some place ...”

“... reluctance’ to talk about herself. She apologises in advance for telling a story that may ‘seem like something out of a novel’, and protests that she is well aware that ‘a woman’s glory lies in not giving rise to gossip.’ Pericles said as much in his funeral oration of 431 BCE as reported by Thucydides, but seldom can that bit of wisdom ...”

“... that of the spirit of a symphony. A salient example of the life helping with the interpretation may be provided by a faultline running through both the early masterpiece, the Tractatus, and the late classic, the Investigations. In each, problems are presented, and then what look like arguments, theses and explanations. But in both cases these expositions ...”

“... wants to borrow money from the Russians). It knows that whatever effect all these things may have on Russia, Putin and Medvedev are on the case. Medvedev is shown a lot on television, about as much as Putin, and usually just before him in each newscast. He is young, in his early forties, but surprisingly lethargic. He’s managed to pick up the Putin ...”

“... lung: spittle settling upon the nutsedge Like almost everything else in Powell, such bleak places may be rescued for the imagination by sex, in the same moments that stamp them as frightening: here I inhaled first plum blossoms and took the yellowjacket stings saying ‘sticks, I live in the sticks, don’t drive me home I’ll sleep instead on your rug, be ...”

“... of India’ or ‘an Indo-Aryan language’. One of the more scholarly sites speculates that it may indeed be more than one language, because its significant dia-lect variations have not yet been thoroughly analysed. Ghosh’s separation of Bhojpuri from Hindustani has a polemical aspect, and sets it apart as a ‘minority’ language at one remove from the ...”

“... free black boy called Homer – sends her scrambling back on the lam. However formulaic it may be, the plot is propulsive, and the book is full of vivid images, learned allusions and astute observations, like this one about a white medical student-cum-bodysnatcher in New England: The other students uttered the most horrible things about the coloured ...”

“... The difference between the Girard-Cadière case and the sexual abuse scandals of our own day, it may seem, is no more than a matter of media technology. Yet the trial itself turned on Cadière’s claims to have experienced miracles, visions and divine possession, and involved testimony obtained during an exorcism. Both Cadière and Girard were accused of ...”

“... but one of its enforcers. Most of China’s current leaders were in their adolescence when the 16 May Circular was drawn up in 1966. This document, issued by the central government as a nationwide instruction to Party officials, transferred responsibility for the ‘cultural revolution’ from the so-called Five Man Group chaired by Peng Zhen to the Cultural ...”

“... cut off from basic supplies. The degree of deprivation differs markedly from siege to siege and may change from week to week. A woman from the town of Madaya, thirty miles west of Damascus, where 43,000 people are under siege from Hezbollah, told me she had been reduced to boiling up thistle-like plants she had picked by the roadside in order to feed her ...”

“... Perhaps this is why she clung firmly to the painterliness of her paintings. Their compositions may sometimes be influenced by her design work, but their surfaces rarely are. Patches of colour are almost never flat or evened out in her paintings, brushstrokes are visible, sometimes pencil too, and planes are liable to fade and blend in and out of each ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... cries beautifully, he is talking about his daughter: ‘She is my great happiness.’ The beauty may be Isabel’s projection at the time: this man is courting her and he has lovely manners. The suspicious reader – or the informed rereader – will feel it is just part of Osmond’s nasty, cramped, aesthetic act. What the adverb isn’t – and the same ...”