“... us firmly in narrating rather than narrated time. And of course destiny itself, whatever else it may be, is always a narrative effect, the insertion of a later perspective (real or imagined) into an earlier one. We may be a little surprised to see Iris Murdoch playing with the Russian Formalists’ distinction of story and ...”

“... drone in 2011.The record of this year’s wars shows that although these weapons may not provide a decisive edge in combat they excel in self-advertisement, projecting an image of all-seeing omnipotence. Drones induce terror in civilian populations and healthy profits for manufacturers. The spell persists even when they are ...”

“... mortgage repayments that nobody can ignore, but which nobody in power seems willing to prevent. In May, the average interest rate for a two-year fixed rate mortgage passed 6 per cent, a reflection of market expectations regarding Bank of England rate rises, which are in turn a response to the sustained difficulty of getting inflation down. Unlike in September ...”

“... In the quite different context of writing to Cassandra in 1796, the adoption of such language may have served to guard genuine tears and badly hurt feelings. (One branch of the Lefroy family maintained the view that ‘Tom … behaved so ill to Jane Austen.’) Perhaps something of the seriousness of her private emotions, and of her determined efforts to ...”

“... a busy day, and that we’ve lost track of the subject of the verb in the last line, and that it may be time for another full stop. It’s true that it isn’t easy to characterise what universities are and what they now do, and so not easy to lay down a ‘vision’ of what they might do in the future. That is partly because of the intrinsic difficulty of ...”

“... little of world-shaking significance has happened there lately, although there are signs that this may now be changing. The most famous Inner Asian of our own times was probably Irving Berlin, and he left at a very early age. Where the Golden Horde has yielded to Alexander’s Ragtime Band why bother about so long ago, so very far away? Of course, such ...”

“... did get on well enough. ‘More than likely,’ Hamilton says, they ‘did bury a few drinks. They may even have stayed up all night.’ However, Writers in Hollywood does take most of its information secondhand, and the narrative is a bit desultory, as if Hamilton didn’t always know why he was retelling this anecdote rather than that. He informs us, for ...”

“... as one of the advantages of a nepotistical system. The author is a little puzzled, as the reader may well be, to know why so many Lyall dependents looked to ‘Uncle William’ for a career. As a dispenser of life’s prizes William hardly compared with his elder brother George, who was chairman of the East India Company and a Member of Parliament for the ...”

“... of its demotic succulence? In one sense, certainly, the language and the life he wrote of may still be alive, in New York and in other places: but the kind of Jewishness – incarnate in speech and spirit, in herring and onion roll – where Singer’s characters reside seems a long way either from modern America or from modern Israel, or from the ...”

“... But since practising Anglicans have come to form only a tiny minority of Britons, the Church may well soon be disestablished. This would compromise the religious role of the monarchy which is part of its charisma. Future British monarchs might – just – be able still to be crowned to Handel’s anthem ‘And Zadok the Priest ... anointed Solomon ...”

“... With whom? Certainly not foreign visitors, who found the advertisements very bizarre. Some may suppose that they were designed to captivate the man who enjoys the pin-up in his tabloid paper over a cuppa or a pint in a smoky café or pub, but he might have found the glib parody of Surrealism bewildering – the Indian fertility goddess blended with the ...”

“... as a model for development. It is as if she believes that, whereas our own pursuit of growth may have had unfortunate environmental consequences, it has broadly achieved what was expected of it, and whatever social problems Western societies may have come from other causes. It is difficult to see what supports this ...”

“... translated ‘On the Nature of Things’ or (as it is here) ‘On the Nature of the Universe’, may well be thought the best philosophy in classical Latin, superior to Cicero or Seneca in intellectual seriousness and sustained power of argument. Yet Cicero, who greatly admired him as a poet, never mentions him as a philosopher, and Seneca is equally ...”

“... of its larger plot, which is what Ford Madox Ford arranged. Ford was a Catholic of sorts, but it may be that it takes writers of more profound or more extreme religious conviction to express the relation of the human and the supernatural plots. Such writers were the subject, some thirty years ago, of Conor Cruise O’Brien’s Maria Cross, and anybody who ...”

“... there for 21 years. Thornton asks us to regard him simply as a morphine addict. Freud and Cocaine may be inspired by concern for drug-damage, for the failures of ‘permissiveness’. It certainly has it in for Charcot, Freud, Marcuse, Timothy Leary. At times, it can look like medical history as penned by Kingsley Amis, and I suspect it of a harmless, if ...”