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“... our being here. So the universe has ‘woken up’, but in a local, accidental and low-key sense. Thomas Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos rejects this view and tries to build another. His subtitle is ‘Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False’. It is false, Nagel says, because it cannot deal with a cluster of real ...”

“... Deleuze and Guattari) has become an appealing metaphor for all sorts of freedom, while the more negative refugeedom described in the work of Giorgio Agamben has been taken to define the condition of all of us in a world in which place-based civic and legal securities are increasingly being eroded by a volatile global economy. But if everyone is an ...”

“... Byron and his friend and collaborator Joseph Drake was the American Keats. Together, somewhat more compromisingly, Halleck and Drake were referred to as the Damon and Pythias of American poets. As one would expect of a man so highly honoured, Halleck could count major cultural figures among his friends – Mozart’s librettist Da Ponte and James Fenimore ...”

“... of our fellow citizens are falling farther and farther behind.’ Who said this? Jeremy Corbyn? Thomas Piketty? In fact it was Nick Hanauer, an American entrepreneur and multibillionaire, who in a TED talk in 2014 confessed to living a life that the rest of us ‘can’t even imagine’. Hanauer doesn’t believe he’s particularly talented or unusually ...”

“... took the time well and the instruments preserved it . . . I have seldom heard a regimental band more perfect than this handful of workmen, located far from any place where they might command the benefits of hearing other bands, in the mountains of Wales . . . Mr Crawshay . . . has shown what the intellectual capacity of the workman is equal to, and ...”

“... the living’ (in Nasser’s words). It would control the Nile flood, allow its water to be used more systematically for irrigation, and generate electricity. These things the dam achieved. It also had serious unwanted consequences. To replace the silt that no longer came down the Nile, electricity from the dam had to go into manufacturing chemical ...”

“... hunters could make ten shillings per wombat scalp. The bounty incentivised hunting; in one year, more than a thousand wombat scalps were traded in by a single landowner. Now, despite its name, the common wombat is no longer common. Overgrazing and the destruction of their natural habitat has caused a sharp drop in their numbers; all species of wombat are now ...”

“... the nature of equality within marriage’.The private lives considered are those of Jane Welsh and Thomas Carlyle; Effie Gray and John Ruskin; Harriet Taylor and John Stuart Mill; Catherine Hogarth and Charles Dickens; George Eliot and George Henry Lewes. This is the form in which Rose presents the couples, with the women taking precedence and preserving their ...”

“... political terror, social cleansing, genocide, slave labour, medical experimentation and more. This is the first book to try to give a comprehensive account of the camp system in its entirety. Wachsmann disentangles the history of the KL from the related but distinct history with which it is often conflated: that of the Holocaust, and ...”

“... what she was going through? ‘Language has not yet been adjusted,’ reflected the physician, Thomas Beddoes, ‘with any degree of exactness, to our inward feelings.’ Miss Martineau’s tender womb certainly entered the public domain, and she was no slouch at what Post-Modernists now call ‘writing the body’; but for all that, the historian is left ...”

“... by a coven of witches evidently visiting from Dunsinane), the cast of Hamlet were compelled once more to enact the fatal events which had convened this feast in Death’s eternal cell, in a mode that combined the nakedly and convincingly traumatic with a Goth-influenced rock soundtrack and some exquisite passages of wordless dance. In a ...”

“... of person to person, idea to utterance, mind to hand to paper – a faith made so much more impossible in the new era of Babel in which Singer was learning English. In his own writing, Foer has shown both an unusual faith in the power of written communication and a true believer’s willingness to test its limits. Although most readers became ...”

“... heart. In this case, it transpired, locals considered the evidence to be overwhelming, and all the more sinister and compelling for being invisible. At least one of the women died as a result of the ordeal; two others were banished. ‘Maybe this will be the last case of its kind,’ Deputy Commander Nili said, knowing this to be unlikely. Around 150 suspected ...”

“... This volume represents more than forty years work by one of the most earnestly devoted and intelligent of our poets. Accordingly it must be considered deliberately, and at some length. Twenty-four years ago, reviewing Enright’s Bread Rather than Blossoms (for all practical purposes his second collection – leaving aside, that is, his 1948 Season Ticket, published in Alexandria), I exhorted him to remember ‘the deeper reaches (and so the deeper humanity) of the art he practises ...”

“... a collected edition of his own plays. No doubt The Workes of Beniamin Jonson, a folio volume of more than a thousand pages, brought a sharp satisfaction to its author. The indignities of an earlier career as a bricklayer could scarcely have been more roundly redeemed. Only the malice of a contemporary wit, Pray tell me ...”