“... from powerful drugs and intrusive procedures. The economic cost is significant: the Health Service may not have funded a woman’s treatment, but it will pick up the bill for multiple births, for premature and low birthweight babies and the continuing illnesses they suffer. The new reproductive technologies are a blessing; a mixed one. They introduce, too, a ...”

“... fiction as if they are in fact fictional, whatever the degree to which their fictional experiences may resemble experiences in the author’s life. Characters in fiction are primarily shaped to serve the expressive needs and imaginative designs of the work in which they appear. This shouldn’t need even to be said. Atlas’s critical naivety and the ...”

“... on ‘The Victorian Values of Dr Tripe’, you’d better carry a chequebook. Shoreditch Town Hall may well be the last place where such an anachronistic object serves any useful purpose, in these days of obligatory standing orders, cashback supermarkets with low-level barter and traded promissory notes for those outside the credit system. What goes on ...”

“... into what can feel like a bottomless pit. Bunyan, like Milton and Blake, is one of the guides we may summon when we find ourselves taking that plunge. Perhaps it is unfair to expect a critic to identify with Bunyan’s dream of truth, but Michael Davies’s lengthy study is remarkable for its failure to empathise with Bunyan’s heroic political ...”

“... novels and adapting them for the silver screen. As the song says: ‘Go out and try your luck/You may be Donald Duck/Hooray for Hollywood.’ America had always been a percentage play, and Hollywood was the fabulous embodiment of the nation’s faith in pluck and luck. To a society that fancied itself a Redeemer Nation, the bonanza of stars, paydays and lush ...”

“... but show herself twice a fool … a woman is always a woman – that is, a fool, whatever part she may have chosen to play.’In medieval and early modern Europe, philosophers – with help from learned lawyers, medics and theologians – developed what became the dominant view in Western philosophy: that women were neither made for, nor capable of, reasoned ...”

“... as late as 1950. Wilson’s first commercial play, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, staged in 1984, may have been experienced by Black audiences as testimony; to white audiences it was still news.In their theatrical dramatisation down the decades from property to personhood, Wilson’s unmoored characters form a kind of fever chart of the trauma of slavery. In ...”

“... want if they are to get re-elected. As Moyn writes, ‘if the voters are wealthy and old, it may not even matter whether the politicians are young.’ I got a glimpse of this dynamic at work in another setting following the general election of 2019. Shortly after the result I met Dehenna Davison, the newly elected Conservative MP for Bishop Auckland, who ...”

“... down with Ina rules, Ina lore, Ina feuds and an exceedingly long and boring Ina court case. And it may be nice, if that’s what you’re into, to read about freely consenting adults enjoying sex with superhumans; it’s less so when participants have, in effect, been drugged. Or when Shori, who’s 53, we’re told, in Ina years, looks like she’s about ...”

“... ironically, to resolve this problem by having him introduce his daughter to a pop singer, who may help the girl to the stardom she’s always wanted. I’m sure she’ll be grateful for a whole minute or two. At a time when hard thrillers have soft hearts, or feel the need at least to pay tribute to such hearts, it’s a pleasure to see two films that ...”

“... in the First World War, on the grounds that the alliance was a defensive arrangement. Then, on 24 May 1915, it declared war on Austria-Hungary. The decision was taken by the king and a minority of the cabinet, without the approval of parliament, after secret meetings in London at which the Entente powers promised that, in the event of victory, Italy would be ...”

“... tale. Putting careers and heartaches to one side, it is true that the anatomy of failure may be more culturally informative than the naming of triumphs. It must be rather shocking for Shyamalan, but his latest movie, The Happening, is one of the most interesting movies of the year, despite being one of the worst. It offers a study in what happens to ...”

“... to set up camp in the local hospital. One gets only a tangential sense of all this here. Maskalyk may go on long cross-country jogs to keep fit, but the town and region remain a blur. Like the other Western volunteers, stretched by fatigue, he rarely holds a conversation with a Sudanese who is not a patient. He notes the ritual markings on the faces of those ...”

“... before the Shankill Road bombing, and there is a palpable sense that, while a political solution may be on the horizon, terrorism quickly mutates into gangsterism. The twist in the novel is the unideological nature of the young Scottish sectarian thug: he is an impoverished, disaffected, prospectless victim of a wider class battle. The fissiparous nature of ...”

“... these things and my father’s fading was because he realised this. The men in the Crosby family may be sensitive to the value of these moments of transcendence, but their womenfolk are not. Howard’s father is sent to an asylum by Howard’s mother, and Howard’s wife, Kathleen, conceals his seizures even from their children. ‘Howard had assumed that ...”