“... to clear up. The same could be said of Rudd’s legacy to the Australian Labor Party. Narcissism may be a self-referential condition, but it ensnares an awful lot of people in its sticky ...”

“... aren’t Swiss hoteliers, don’t have franc-denominated mortgages, and don’t gamble on forex, may not feel too bothered about all this. The trouble with the Olympian perspective concerns the underlying reason for the SNB’s sudden move. It seems that the central bank abandoned its currency peg because it didn’t feel it could defend it any more in the ...”

“... Normal modern-art-space is unbounded and ungrounded, and once upon a time those qualities may have had some life – some danger – in them. Not any more: the shallows have become a paddling pool. It is as if viewers now go to visual art for reassurance about the endlessness (the harmlessness) of the ‘virtual’, as once they went to it for a model ...”

“... avoid noxious winds in the same way as one would avoid an arrow.’ Fruits, meat, fish and fowl may be eaten, but no vegetables. Final Chapter of the Continued Explanations of the True Origin, the Great Cave, and the Highest Direction by Anonymous (14th century) It is noted that there are no previous chapters to which this text corresponds. Five Charms ...”

“... for its single storyline not to go off the rails. In this case an absurd plot (all murder plots may be absurd, but some are more absurd than others), set in decidedly unabsurd Hebden Bridge, is filled in with graphically threatened violence, and often enough the acts themselves. A mousey accountant gets his own back on his boss who refuses him a raise to ...”

“... nobody knows anything. Wow. There’s so much big-picture bad economic news at the moment that it may seem hard to get excited about this point – but it is an important one, because it shows just how badly capitalism has been functioning, even on its own ...”

“... the Mughals or the Chinese. Harrison argues that differing ideas of political rights and duties may have mattered more than medical traditions. ‘Put simply, more was expected of European rulers,’ who felt obliged to do something when epidemics loomed, rather than simply offer charity once one had started. By the early 17th century, quarantine was ...”

“... entirely comfortable, entirely at home. We know who the boss is here, whatever race and money may say. Foxx shoots both Jackson’s kneecaps to pieces and leaves him lying in the burning house before he proceeds to his iconic final pose. But what this man represents can’t be disposed of so readily. For a moment Tarantino asks us to consider the ...”

“... an image of evil as it does of innocence. As Kael says of the governess, ‘in her idealism, she may expect children to be so innocent that she regards actual children as corrupt.’ We are not at all far from The Exorcist, where our fantasies require us to prefer possession by the devil to a child’s growing up and learning to ...”

“... expectations, condemned to repeat the story that brought them to its attention. Their work may have the comforting assurance of repeated ritual, but it loses energy, and though it’s not the transgressors’ fault when their line in outrageous blasphemy becomes all the rage, it defangs their bite. The friezes of silhouettes in this show are Walker’s ...”

“... this spring, which rent for $9.95 a day. When Anthony Weiner entered the New York mayoral race in May, everybody knew he was, by a new measure of techno-uxoriousness, no good. The former congressman’s saga has now taken the form of a trilogy: less Mailer, whose hero’s excesses are ever on display, than Roth, whose repressed outsiders climb to the top only ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... at all, she’s too ironic and alert, and the script does give her character some ambiguity: she may really love the victim more than she loves the man who owns her, as the boss’s assistant phrases it. But then she loves wealth and security more than anything. There’s something weirdly sensible about this, particularly where so much mystery surrounds ...”