“... success – a good level of temporary protection – is higher than the chance of full success. It may well be that two doses of the vaccine are required for better protection, or that we will eventually prefer one of the hundreds of vaccines currently in earlier stages of development. I would be extremely surprised if we never develop an effective vaccine. A ...”

“... of the American activist Angela Davis than with what happened in Notting Hill the same year. This may be the reason McQueen, who developed the series over many years, wanted it to be shown on the BBC. Small Axe has a Reithian spirit. The two best episodes, however, ‘Lovers Rock’ and ‘Education’ (written with Courttia Newland and Alastair Siddons ...”

“... in New Guinea. ‘Nature seems to have taken every precaution that these, her choicest treasures, may not lose value by being too easily obtained,’ Alfred Russel Wallace wrote in 1862. New Guinea’s birdlife is not a secret the island has locked away in its forests, however, but a gift it has spread around the world. According to The Largest Avian ...”

“... or developed and remain little more than names). Only the narrator recurs and even he/she may be a different person each time, linked by a common belief in what makes life worth living: art, beauty, nature, friendship, freedom, fresh air and exercise. At the outset, the mood is ominous rather than terrifying. Books keep going missing from ...”

“... techniques and delivered as a template to Surrealists-to-be in his revelatory show in Paris in May 1921. In Belgium, Magritte soon developed a related model of the image – Ernst called it ‘painted collage’ – that was also disruptive in composition but more uniform in facture, and it was even more influential. Meanwhile Yves Tanguy, along with ...”

“... and their reactions range from bewildered irritation to dismay. While the idea of being godlike may be attractive, being an actual god is less so. One is at the mercy of one’s worshippers, who tend to be demanding, dictatorial and impossible to shake off. Anna Della Subin’s Accidental Gods is a philosophical and historical exploration of the phenomenon ...”

“... come to be seen as a period of national healing is an open question. The exit from Afghanistan may have been humiliating, but something of the sort was inevitable in a war that had long become futile. Although Biden’s Build Back Better social and infrastructure bill has been trimmed from $3.5 trillion to $2.2 trillion, it represents a larger expansion of ...”

“... the emphatic lesson of the memoirs is Tanizaki’s fond yearning for the past. Certain houses ‘may be inconvenient, as is often said, but they remind me of the old days, and I love them for it’. Of sacred dances at the Shinto shrines he writes, ‘I find myself longing to experience once more the atmosphere of those performances on a long, slow spring ...”

“... a fact long before it was an idea.’ Elsewhere he says that ‘collective ownership of land may never really have existed.’ Much effort in the late 19th century was put into attempts to establish a past of collective ownership: this informed the Napier Commission’s approach to the issue of Highland land, but the Commission had to admit that there ...”

“... not challenging it’, and largely lacking in ‘philosophical profundity’. These judgments may be all very well as far as they go; there is certainly no need to see Korinna as a creative genius. But they fail to engage directly with the central problem of women’s writing within a male tradition. Was Korinna, as Snyder appears to suggest, simply ...”

“... on source criticism in the second half of the book, even the not-so-conventional historian may well remain uneasy about which parts of Canfora’s story of the library are drawn from ancient accounts and which are appropriate but still imaginary reconstructions. And there are still some hidden prejudices at work. Why, for example, does he so firmly ...”

“... in what both see (Boruvka with much more reason) as a corrupt society. Skvorecky’s prose may be as terse as the translation makes it seem, but must surely be more lively and less repetitious. Boruvka is often overcome by ‘deep sadness’ and frequently gives ‘long sad looks’, but sad also are flowers in a vase, an abandoned shoe, and other ...”

“... if things develop the way things developed in Europe over the last forty or fifty years, this may beget a gradual emotional defusion. First of all, there will be the joy, the tremendous joy I saw on my grandfather’s face when Israel became a state. Then there will be the problem of the morning after and they will discover that their economy is ...”

“... much a part of the language no-body pays attention to it anymore.’ Through Jonathan the reader may feel what it means to lose one’s bearings, to be made less than human. In Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Virgin Suicides the Lisbon sisters have taken the American dream of a life unblemished by experience to its extreme. Their suicide is an escape and a ...”

“... of choosing different acts. Symbolic richness (the white whale, the Scarlet Letter A, Walden Pond) may reconcile writers and readers to the United States or, as in Melville’s Pierre, turn back on the interpreter in a nightmare of self-referentiality that cuts words off entirely from the world. But Pierre’s negative exception proves the positive-thinking ...”