“... excellent explanation at least for part of the difficulty. The trouble with the simple lyric poems may just be their extraordinary simplicity, and faced with the renowned ‘Über alien Gipfeln/Ist Ruh,’ Boyle just throws up his hands: ‘There is little sensible that literary criticism can say about something so delicate and so matchless.’ I’m sure this ...”

“... Mac against a US standard. Belief in the stable identity of the product, wherever in the world it may be consumed, is one of the conditions of its success. Stability across space and time is central to both the notion and the value of a brand, and the McDonald’s brand, or the more specific brand of the Big Mac, is worth a lot. Note, however, that the ...”

“... inevitably develops a few singular, unassimilable and slightly silly convictions. (The graph may be parabolic, with the highest incidence of convictions – and the legal resonance is invited – found among those who have spent the most time thinking and those who have spent next to no time thinking.) My own such amateur conviction is that the life of ...”

“... different as any two humans could possibly be, who fall into the orbit of a man whose sexual power may be likened to gravity. Williams wanted a great director for his play but weeks passed with no word from Kazan, who was called Gadget or Gadge by everybody in the theatre world. When Williams called Kazan at home, Molly, Kazan’s wife, picked up the ...”

“... made widows and their children are made orphans, in order that a few speculative scoundrels … may make unhallowed gains. Naming three vessels recently lost with all hands and two more abandoned by their crews, he asked ‘whether the registered owner of these ships, Edward Bates, is the member for Plymouth, or if it is some other person of the same ...”

“... basic medical services have been shut down as a result of the crisis. Most of Ebola’s victims may well be dying from other causes: women in childbirth, children from diarrhoea, people in road accidents or from trauma of other sorts. There’s little doubt that the current epidemic can be stopped, but no one knows when or how it will be reined in. As ...”

“... mind. He is growing into himself. ‘We have a bunch of dandy fellows in our unit,’ he writes in May 1918, ‘and are going to have a wonderful time.’ There has never been a more self-conscious ‘soldier’ in the history of literature. From New York: It was funny yesterday when we donned our uniforms. We put them on yest aft and went to supper and then ...”

“... world so long to fall in love with the books. The second big reason for the success of the series may be adjacent to the point about instability. It concerns magic. The whole issue of magic, in turn, seems to be the principal turn-off (‘elves don’t exist’) for non-readers of fantasy. In Westeros, people agree with that. They don’t believe in magic ...”

“... sex, Lambert looked elsewhere; in all, he had four sexual relationships while undercover. In May 1987, just before the Debenhams action, he met Karen. It was standard SDS practice for officers to begin by infiltrating less radical groups in order to get to their real targets. Charlotte was Lambert’s way in. But Karen wasn’t an activist, and she gave ...”

“... the bewildering array of new opportunities for profit opened up by its disappearance. This in turn may be the key to why journalists have so often been targeted. For in the bulk of cases, what was at stake was not the truth of a conflict or murky state secrets, but seemingly more mundane business dealings: property developments, control of a company, factory ...”

“... In other words, if French syntax is imported directly into English, sentences that work in French may come across as rambling or incoherent in English. This is precisely what happens here. While Borde and Malovany-Chevallier fetishise Beauvoir’s semicolons, they fail to respect the structure of the sentences and clauses between the semicolons. Throughout ...”

“... wealth, easy success, unproblematic seductions and vast readership. Even among writers, there may be odd moments of honesty. Hugo von Hofmannsthal, who for the best part of 30 years shared a publisher with Zweig, Anton Kippenberg, founder of the Insel Verlag, wrote to dispraise him; when Kippenberg, foolishly trying to change Hofmannsthal’s ...”

“... idea from the main candidates in the French presidential election.When Sarkozy became president in May, he made Kouchner minister of foreign affairs. The new president had been elected on a programme of rupture, but no one was sure whether he would break decisively with Françafrique, the network of financial and military ties that binds France to the regimes ...”

“... official Soviet press. There’s a whiff of the dissertation in Johnston’s Being Soviet: readers may become irritated by the appearance every few pages of the term ‘bricolage’, signifying Soviet citizens’ sensible habit of taking on board only the bits of official propaganda that made sense to them and ignoring the rest. Still, that’s an improvement ...”

“... were dreaming of becoming a global power. This step was not as obvious or inevitable as it may now appear. Americans before the Second World War spoke less of the country’s exceptional primacy than of its exceptional aloofness from European-style power politics. They prided themselves on being above espionage, diplomatic intrigue and standing ...”