“... for the work – probably about the strongest reproach he thought it prudent to make. The offer may in fact have been intended as a fairly gracious recognition of his popularity as a writer for children, but by the standards of his friends, and what seemed Gay’s legitimate expectations, it wasn’t half gracious enough. Some of the blame for his frequent ...”

“... absurdity of novel-writing with a shrug and a smile of apparent shamelessness. You, the reader, may settle your fable-land in your own fashion. Anything you like happens in fable-land. Wicked folks die ... annoying folks are got out of the way ... the hero and heroine happy ever after ... Ah, happy harmless fable-land, where these things are! Friendly ...”

“... economic analysis as the tool best adapted to the exploration and adjustment of the law. This may seem a cheap shot, but there is a telling passage in Eric Hobsbawm’s Age of Extremes: Those of us who lived through the years of the Great Slump still find it almost impossible to understand how the orthodoxies of the pure free market, then so obviously ...”

“... Yet that was the political game to which Healey had given the best years of his life. Auden may have made a passing allusion to ‘the flat ephemeral pamphlet and the boring meeting’, but Healey had, for forty years, spent taxing days drafting the former and weary evenings attending the latter. It was the struggle to which he had devoted himself: a ...”

“... very much, but they sure do drink a lot’. What the real if apocryphally reported housekeepers may not have noted – obliged as they were to be constantly cleaning up after those chaste philosophical revellers – is that philosophers do talk about sex. True, until fairly recently, ‘professional philosophers’ (themselves a recent invention) couldn’t ...”

“... If the past is another country where they do things differently, we may well ask whether we are abroad if we visit the England of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn. In September 1528, Henry wrote to Anne: ‘No more to you at this present, mine own darling, for lack of time, but that I would you were in mine arms or I in yours, for I think it long since I kissed you ...”

“... who were charged with the maintenance of the scrolls exercised considerable licence, one may infer, in expanding or modifying their contents, incorporating elements of oral lore and inventing new materials. As Toorn trenchantly puts it, ‘the books of the Bible were not designed to be read as unities. They rather compare to archives. A biblical book ...”

“... news feeds, graphs and spreadsheets that cover his computer screens, listening to the brokers he may deal through and taking calls from other banks, forming a judgment on the current momentum of the market and watching out for mispriced assets. Most markets cover similar products whose prices should move largely in line with each other. While having to guess ...”

“... the smallest significant chance that X has happened, then we have no choice but to do Y.’ If X may lead to a catastrophe that must be avoided at all costs (like a nuclear attack on an American city), then we need to swing into action immediately and do Y. No further questions. Think about the real-world consequences of focusing in this way on the ...”

“... in Atlanta but his associates are still known to whip out their tommy guns when provoked, and they may or may not be behind the bomb that gets rolled under Stuffy Keegan’s hooch wagon one fine day. But they can be friendly enough, at least with a guy like Hicks, who’s happy shooting the breeze with an old goombah like ...”

“... are being tested in a short space of time under conditions that are hard to monitor. The patient may have a cough or a fever, or be short of breath – but there are also many cases of asymptomatic infection, making an outbreak significantly harder to contain.Wuhan, the capital of Hubei province, where the virus emerged, was locked down on 23 January. Since ...”

“... of abusing their charges. In the case of Congleton it appears that some fifteen other adults may also have been involved in child sex: it was a ‘sex ring’ – a vague expression which is nevertheless surely correct in its implication of group commitment to a particular sexual practice. It is also reasonable to suppose that the signals reaching ...”

“... famous, as gifted writers do – what else is there to do but write?’ That rhetorical question may on first reading seem to strike a bleak note, as though all else had lost its savour, but in context it gestures towards an inner imperative, that achieved condition of the writer, whether critic or novelist, in which experience is not fully possessed until ...”

“... some idea of the texture of everyday life in Nebuchadnezzar’s Babylon. The majority of tablets may be the equivalent of office files – letters, legal documents, contracts, mortgages, lists of goods – but there are also messages addressed to the gods, some of them expressing indignance that good behaviour has not been rewarded. Astronomical observations ...”

“... they failed to move that forward. Erdogan’s irate response to the House resolution suggests this may not work. It was inevitable that Turkey’s ambassador in Washington would be recalled. But Erdogan also remarked that Turkey had 100,000 illegal Armenian immigrants and could deport them any time it chose, a comment so ill-conceived that it aroused a storm ...”